DCHP-3

Howe Street

DCHP-2 (Oct 2012)
n. — Finance

the financial and banking community in Vancouver.

Type: 4. Culturally Significant — The term Howe Street refers to the location of many of Vancouver's financial institutions, including the old Vancouver Stock Exchange building, and the area around it. This financial hub is described as Vancouver's equivalent of Bay Street in Toronto (see the 1964 quotation) or Wall Street in New York (see the 2008 quotation). The term has been used to describe the financial community in Vancouver at least since the 1980s (see the 1988 quotation).
See also COD-2, s.v. "Howe Street" (2), which is marked "Cdn.".

Quotations

1964
The Howe Street boys have lit a prairie fire on the Vancouver Stock Exchange and the more conservative brokerage firms are having a hard time putting it out. Howe Street is the B.C. equivalent of Bay Street in Toronto. (So far this year, 363,465,000 have been traded on the Vancouver exchange, compared with a 110,000,000 for the whole of 1963. [...])
1980
Now, while NDP leader David Barrett struts in banker's suited-splendor, hoping to hold his breath longer than the business community's memories of his administration's punitive mining taxation, Mr. Bennett is seen to be bricking up the wall between himself and Vancouver's Howe Street honchos.
1987
Try as we may, British Columbia remains a frontier, perhaps a somewhat sophisticated one. I mean, the guys on Howe Street wear Guccis along with their white belts. The wonders of mass communications keep us much closer in touch with what is going on in the world than we were even a decade ago. And, after all, we do have some cultural institutions.
1988
He also dismissed comments by stock promoter Murray Pezim that the financial community on Howe Street will no longer fund the party because of the premier's performance. "Murray Pezim is not the business community. We have business people, small and large, throughout the province. The people on Howe Street don't have a monopoly," Vander Zalm told reporters.
1996
Forget the drug trade at Hastings and Main. Set aside, for a moment, East End home invasions and Westside carjacking gangs that target the Mercedes and Lexus crowd. Leave for later the stock manipulators and scammers on Howe Street. The Moriarity of Kerrisdale, archfiend behind a crime wave that spans eight volumes, has struck again.
1996
More tales from the far side, a.k.a. Howe Street ... On Wednesday, we reported that VSE officials had halted trading in Highgrade Ventures Ltd. after learning that its promoter, Patrick Kephart, had been cited by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in an alleged bribery scheme.
2008
Chartered accountant and long-time Howe Street stock promoter Henry Jung acted as an undisclosed director and officer of a TSX Venture Exchange company and violated securities laws when he distributed millions of dollars in debentures to Canadian investors [...]
2013
A retired Vancouver Sun columnist who spent more than two decades exposing shady business dealings on Howe Street and across the country will be honoured next month with a coveted lifetime achievement award.
2013
He sees himself as part of a new mining generation, different from the old crowd that made "Howe Street" shorthand for shameless stock promotion. In selling his stories to investors, he concedes that he advances the positive aspects ahead of the negative ones, but his endgame is to sell a real company, not to serve as a huckster for a stable of scant-hope shells.

References

  • COD-2