what are they wearing on wall street week this week?

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December 1972. You're producing a weekly show about finance for PBS. The final episode of the calendar year is upon you. How can you spice things up to mark the upcoming new year? 

Throw a party on-air of course! Pop a few corks, encourage your guests to wear their snazziest socializing threads, and encourage the host to go into full lounge lizard mode. Because, when you cross the financial markets in New York with Playboy After Dark, how can you lose? (Though, sadly, you aren't able to hire any groovy rock bands.)

Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985.

Wall Street Week was one of those shows whose opening credits fascinated me as a kid. Something about the energetic music and (even by the early 1980s) retro graphics, coupled with a few moments of Louis Rukeyser's soothing voice. Never mind that I no idea how financial markets worked, or that I'd flip the channel within a few minutes. 


Financial Post, May 13, 1978.

A piece on a Wall Street Week taping in Toronto, profiling the state of the series in the late 1970s.  Rukeyser hosted the show until 2002, when producers forced him out as part of an effort to "make the show as fresh as the economic news it examines," which also included a partnership with Fortune magazine. The show was gone within three years. 

Additional material from the March 22, 2002 edition of the National Post. 



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