As a rhetorical target
In the April 18, 2010 episode, Bob Zadek framed “Wall Street” as a label deployed in Washington to deflect blame for regulatory failure. He said the Washington establishment, to the extent it can blame the alleged crisis on the market, can distract attention from its own failures, and he characterized the message as telling the public to look at Wall Street rather than at the government — while, in his account, officials “encouraged homeownership” and “didn’t do our job regulating the banks.” He quoted William Dudley, whom he identified as the present Fed Chairman and Geithner’s successor, saying “Significant weaknesses in the execution of the supervisory program occurred” and that the Federal Reserve and other regulators “could have done much better.” Zadek read this as an admission that regulators, not the market, were at fault The Credit Crunch (2010).
Zadek then made a distinction central to the episode: “Wall Street is a street. Streets don’t cause problems; institutions do.” He said he had a brokerage account managed by a broker who works in San Francisco and supposed that broker is part of Wall Street, and that he had no grievance with Wall Street. He asked who exactly the Wall Street being targeted is, what they did wrong, and why they need more oversight. His answer was that the market worked fine and that government interference distorted it — naming Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae and Barney Frank in the housing market, wage and price controls in World War II as the origin of employer-provided healthcare, and statutes allowing teachers to unionize as the turning point for education The Credit Crunch (2010).
In the morality-of-capitalism argument
The October 27, 2012 episode treated “Wall Street bankers” as a stock figure in media indictments of capitalism. Zadek described a MarketWatch blog by Paul Farrell titled, in his rendering, “Capitalism’s Frankenstein Economics,” and read a line from it: “Billionaires, corporate CEOs, Wall Street bankers, and other capitalists focus narrowly on closing stock prices, quarterly earnings, and annual bonuses.” Zadek’s objection was to the selection: he asked who could be less representative of capitalist America than that crowd The Morality of Capitalism (2012).
Guest Tom G. Palmer responded that it is hard to say, that undoubtedly some Wall Street bankers are pro-free market and there might be a handful of billionaires, and that many billionaires are anti-market. The audio cut out repeatedly during his answer, and Zadek reconnected with him. Zadek added that Wall Street bankers are “one of the most protected-by-government classes in America” and hardly representative of capitalism in its purest sense, and said a banker would be on the show the next week. He also cited Al Gore’s reported increase in wealth after leaving government as hardly representative of capitalist America The Morality of Capitalism (2012).
The episode’s discussion of greed turned on a dictionary definition Zadek read from the Merriam-Webster Student Dictionary — “a selfish desire for food, money, or possessions,” with the qualifier “over and above one’s needs” — from which he argued that everyone is greedy. Palmer took “a little bit of issue” with how people use the word, saying they normally mean grabbing more than your fair share or pushing someone out of line, and that this is not what capitalism is about. Palmer offered George Soros as an example of an investor critical of capitalism who gives away hundreds of millions of dollars, including building a water treatment plant in Sarajevo and paying a hundred million dollars of his own money to Soviet nuclear physicists to do pure research rather than work for North Korea, Libya or Iran. Zadek agreed, framing the difference as the methods used to acquire money rather than the desire for it The Morality of Capitalism (2012).
Media, taxes and the Wall Street Journal
The January 10, 2021 episode did not address Wall Street as an institution; it concerned media as entertainment. Zadek told guest Nick that he had taken an oath not to watch the news, that the news had become entertainment, and that once news competes for attention commercially its success is measured by a different matrix. He argued that entertainment equals emotional excitement, and that the news excites by making people fearful or angry rather than better informed The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
The May 23, 2021 episode on the corporate income tax is relevant to Wall Street chiefly through its guest and its source. Zadek introduced Richard Rubin as the US tax policy reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Washington, focusing on taxes, politics and economics, and said that through attrition the Wall Street Journal had become the only provider of objective news he allows access to his brain. He described Rubin as his tax tutor and noted Rubin had covered tax policy at Bloomberg and the Congressional Quarterly, written about local governments and transportation policy, and started his career, Zadek believed, with the Charlotte Observer. The episode’s framing was that government competes to be the “well-being vendor” for the dollars individuals spend, and that government is the stealthiest pickpocket Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).
The Wall Street Rule and institutional voting
The December 12, 2022 episode, with Paul Atkins, discussed the “Wall Street Rule” directly. Zadek cited a statistic that 97% of individual investors supported the existing Exxon board while a substantial majority of institutional investors, investing other people’s money, voted against existing management. He argued that the individual votes were effectively reversed and offset by the votes of a tiny handful of decision-makers at BlackRock, and that shareholder democracy had been torn apart. He said the collateral damage falls on Exxon’s employees, suppliers, creditors and investors, and asked whether it is hyperbole to fear that the allocation of capital supporting higher living standards is at risk The Political Pollution of Capital Markets (2022).
Atkins said he did not remember whether the figure was 97% but that it was “90-something.” He described the old Wall Street Rule: if you had shares with a broker, the broker would send the proxy statement and ask how to vote, and up until about 2010 brokers would follow the rule, ensconced in stock exchange rules, to vote uninstructed shares with management — on the reasoning that an investor unhappy with management would sell and put money elsewhere. Atkins said that under the Obama administration the SEC strong-armed the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ to change their rules and do away with the Wall Street Rule, so brokers will not vote individuals’ uninstructed shares, giving more power to union pension funds and activist funds. He said people usually on the left, unable to get things through Congress, increasingly try to get them through regulation, especially at the SEC in the Biden administration, and can now pressure companies through investment managers toward Net Zero by arbitrary dates such as 2030 or 2050 The Political Pollution of Capital Markets (2022).
Across episodes
The topic recurs in 2010, 2012 and 2022, and the treatment shifts: in 2010 Zadek treats Wall Street as a misapplied label for market failure he attributes to government; in 2012 he and Palmer treat “Wall Street bankers” as a media caricature of capitalism and as a government-protected class; in 2022 Atkins supplies a concrete institutional mechanism — the abandonment of the Wall Street Rule — by which individual investor votes were displaced in favor of institutional and activist voting. The 2021 episodes touch the topic only through the Wall Street Journal as a news source and through media as entertainment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts never define Wall Street as an organization, nor do they give a founding date, membership, or formal structure; Zadek explicitly says it is a street. No excerpt states what any court held, which statute or amendment was at issue, or the outcome of any regulatory proceeding. The 2021 media episode and the corporate income tax episode supply no facts about Wall Street institutions beyond Zadek’s description of the Wall Street Journal and its reporter.