Wall & Broadcast

In July of 2012, Guy Gentile, a self-described business maven with day-trading operations in the Bahamas and the U.S., was arrested while sitting on the tarmac of White Plains Airport in Westchester NY. Guy was given an ultimatum…either help the US government catch Wall Street insiders who had gone bad, or spend his days in the Federal lockup awaiting charges of wire fraud. Come along with Wall & Broadcast as Guy tells his story of...

If there’s one thing the election of President Donald J. Trump has taught us, it is to question everything we’ve historically assumed to be true. What if you had to guess someone’s political affiliation based solely on their stated views on market regulation? Do you think you’d be able to do it? We at Wall and Broadcast wanted to take a closer look at how people actually feel about regulating Wall Street, especially as the current ...

Social media is everywhere. Even if you wanted to, it seems you cannot escape its influence. This is just as true for the financial markets. Today’s investors and traders are looking for an edge, and the smart ones are turning to social media to gain that advantage. But it’s not in the way you might think.

In this week’s episode, we introduce you to two professionals who are looking at social media in a whole new way. These pioneer...

What is credit? Why does it exist? How do we decide who gets it? In episode 9 of the Wall & Broadcast we explore the evolution of the concept of credit and how we determine who is creditworthy. Many of us take advantage of credit every day without thinking twice – whether through the use of our American Express, Visa or CITGO cards, our mortgage or home equity loans. But what happens when, through no fault of our own, we do not hav...

Sometimes it’s hard to judge a person by what you read about them in the press. And with Patrick Byrne, the controversial CEO of Overstock.com, it’s especially hard, because he has a lot of haters. In episode 8 of the Wall & Broadcast, we try to cut through the noise and get to the heart of what drives Patrick Byrne. He’s on a quest to remake Wall Street. Why? Because he’s been burned by Wall Street in the past, and much like Charl...

To some in the business world and on Wall Street, the growing expectation that one must pair “doing good” with “doing business” – described by terms like “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) and “environmental social and corporate governance” (ESG) – feels like being told to eat more fiber. A firm’s leaders may genuinely care about social and environmental issues. They may be actively involved in philanthropic projects to addres...

This is the 2nd part of a two-part episode on Charlie Shrem, America’s first Bitcoin superstar.  When we left Charlie at the end of Episode 1, he was just being confronted by joint FBI, DEA, IRS task force at JFK Airport in New York.  Upon his arrival, he is arrested and detained by the federal authorities.  Tune into the second part of this two-part episode to find out what happened to Charlie. Why was he detained?  On what charge...

There was a time; not so long ago, that Bitcoin was just an obscure little diversion for the hardest of the hard-core crypto geeks existing on the fringes of the internet.  Out of those recesses rose a quiet young yeshiva student from Brooklyn who would seize upon a unique opportunity, using his own personal experiences and his love of computers to create one of the first successful retail Bitcoin enterprises.  His name was Charlie...

If you’re anything like us here at Wall & Broadcast, you love movies about Wall Street.  Whether it’s the sheer outright hilarity of Trading Places, the brutal ruthlessness of Margin Call, the gritty day to day grind of Boiler Room, or the mixture of greed, wealth and power of The Wolf of Wall Street, we can’t seem to get enough of what Hollywood is saying about our industry.  But is Hollywood getting it right?  Strap in for anothe...

We at Wall & Broadcast keep hearing stories about the millennial generation’s disdain for traditional banks. And there are lots of new finance apps out there, so they should be able to opt out of traditional banking no problem right? But are millennials truly opting out of traditional banking? Walk with us as we discover what it really means to live without a bank account in America. And what alternatives really exist right now for...

Money certainly doesn’t grow on trees but what would you do if ceased to exist? In episode 2 of Wall & Broadcast, we look inside a state penitentiary where the use of US currency is forbidden but a secret economic system has taken hold. And we visit a country where the official currency has failed to see how people respond when the money they’ve come to rely on becomes worthless. In the process we discover that, in addition to love...

There’s an undercurrent in our mainstream culture today, a prevailing sense that our financial markets are rigged. This zeitgeist has existed very strongly since the crash of 2007/08. Some may know very little about how the markets operate and yet they tend to harbor at least a seed of doubt; ‘maybe the markets are rigged – I would believe it if they were.’ Others, who are more fluent in the language of the markets - for example, a...