Populism Comes to Wall Street
YieldStreet wants to make exotic bets available to individual investors online.
YieldStreet’s Michael Weisz and Milind Mehere.
Photographer: Yael Malka for Bloomberg BusinessweekMilind Mehere keeps plenty of copies of Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir about poverty in the Rust Belt, on hand for visitors to his Midtown Manhattan office. Mehere talks about how ordinary people are shut out of opportunities to build wealth. “If we don’t change fundamentally how we save, invest, and actually make money as a society, there will be anarchy in 20 or 30 years,” he says.
The implicit pitch? That YieldStreet Inc., his online investment company, can help democratize high finance. It’s selling alternative investments normally reserved for billionaires and hedge funds. For now, his crowdfunding startup caters to the mass affluent—individuals who are so-called accredited investors, meaning they have $1 million in net worth or make at least $200,000 a year. A successful New Jersey doctor or dentist, perhaps.