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Robbing You Blind
by Mark Dempsey
"Merrill Lynch's employees lied to clients"
Protecting Your Money from Wall Street's Hidden Costs and Half-Truths: Moneymaking
Strategies for Today's Investor by Mark Dempsey. Once a high flyer at a major
brokerage, he now says he succeeded only by cajoling clients into purchases that
helped him meet sales goals"
If the average investor only knew what really goes on behind the
scenes with their money they'd think differently about having us
manage it."
Related Story. Broker
Chat - Whistle
Blower
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Wall
Street Versus America : The Rampant Greed and
Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments
by Gary Weiss
Never mind Enron—corruption,
fraud and towering incompetence are Wall Street's
daily bread and butter, insists this lively j'accuse.
Ex-BusinessWeek reporter Weiss (Born
to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street) details
the myriad ways the financial industry preys on small
investors. Scraping the bottom are the boiler-room
operators who peddle worthless microcap stocks over
the phone and the "paid research" outfits hired by
companies to tout their stocks under the guise of
independent analysis. But the author finds plenty
of chicanery at the pinnacle of Wall Street probity,
blue-chip mutual funds, which, he contends, charge
exorbitant fees and pay kickbacks to brokers to steer
customers their way—while yielding a markedly
worse return than market indexes. He also pillories
the industry's toothless watchdogs—the New
York Stock Exchange, a business media addicted to
hype and puffery, and a do-nothing Securities and
Exchange Commission. (Weiss's savaging of oft-lionized
ex-SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is particularly vicious
and funny.) The author sometimes meanders, and his
cures for the rot—empowered short-selling and
investor grousing on the Internet—seem pretty
feeble. But Weiss's wise-guy attitude and muckraking
chops make for a devastating broadside.
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American
Sucker
by David Denby
In 2000, the bottom dropped
out of David Denby's life when his wife announced she was leaving
him. To make matters worse, it looked like he might lose their beloved
apartment in the split. Determined to hold onto his home and seized
by the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market, Denby joined
the investment frenzy with a particular goal: to make $1 million
in one year so he could buy out his wife's share of their home. Denby
gathered courage from stock analysts, from the siren song of CNBC,
and from tech gurus and lying CEOs at investment conferences. He
befriended tech stars like ImClone founder Sam Waksal and Merrill
Lynch analyst Henry Blodgett, both now disgraced in scandals. He
plunged into a season of mania, swept forward on the currents of
greed, hucksterism, and native American optimism that caught up so
many in that era--wit | |
