Glossary: Wall Street – Write-Downs

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• Wall Street – this phrase refers to New York financial institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange, banks, brokerages, commodity markets, and money markets. It is named after a street in New York City where all financial business used to happen. Today, most of these institutions have moved to other locations in New York.
• Write-downs – refers to the practice of reducing the paper value of an asset due to depreciation. This happens often when dealing with assets of a fixed life span such as a car. With mortgages, whose value should ideally be rising as time goes on, the technique is used when there is a whole scale readjustment in the housing market.

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