$10.99 with 56 percent savings

List Price: $24.95

$4.99 delivery Thursday, May 16. Details

Or fastest delivery May 10 - 14. Details

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$10.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

musicogswell books & more

Ships from

musicogswell books & more

Sold by

musicogswell books & more

Sold by

musicogswell books & more

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt. You may receive a partial or no refund on used, damaged or materially different returns.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

$6.09

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less See less

FREE delivery May 16 - 17. Details

Or fastest delivery May 10 - 14. Details

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$10.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Ships from and sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (10) from $6.09 & FREE Shipping

Follow the author

Gary Weiss

+ Follow

More books from this author

Wall Street Versus America: The Rampant Greed and Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments Hardcover – April 6, 2006

by Gary Weiss (Author)

3.8 18 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$10.99","priceAmount":10.99,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"10","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"59tzNEr%2FxDluVxT83usKfxhaRFP%2F8yz7ojkxBnbSL6xv5cSX35eI%2FZQRdpnZUGLtn2kazZ1bro4NstOWcQBNS7l6dGf8ecVIP0WtFCNRwz3pZRO0yuNJNb0sor17Fx4%2Fgb%2BKO1OWZb4L5YPTU5Q78860RVS%2FhNlAMMzTJTRSmkkFgDS3zNcnrg%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$6.09","priceAmount":6.09,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"6","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"09","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"59tzNEr%2FxDluVxT83usKfxhaRFP%2F8yz7zD6g%2FC33jOnTmarvWcYzS9upJHEpVgAtpa2CGuZEXUkBXcI2qWVv2F0kkzFdBjmnY1DGTjxW%2BtfsPiiceEqiCdvKLjAUu0qlHhRDXg7%2BJFdUIvVZIPnJd7Xfp9CKK%2BcOsn477%2FRFgYY%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A shocking appraisal that shows how Wall Street is intrinsically corruptand what individual investors can do to protect themselves

For several years high-profile corporate wrongdoers have been vilified by the media. Yet the problem, according to Gary Weiss, is not just a few isolated instances of malfeasance. The problem is in the very fabric of Wall Street and its practices that enable and even encourage corruptionpractices that are so pervasive and so difficult to combat that they are in effect perfect crimes, with the small investor left holding the bag.

In this blistering report from the front, Weiss describes how the ethos of Mafia chophouses, boiler rooms, and penny stock peddlers now permeates all of Wall Street. Protected from investor lawsuits by laughably corrupt arbitration systems, Wall Street firms are free to fleece unsuspecting clients with little or no risk. But as this empowering book shows, ordinary investors can fight back and come out on topif they learn to recognize warning signs, filter media chatter, and spot looming corporate meltdowns in advance.

Prepare to be surprised, get angry, and then get even. Wall Street Versus America is a wild ride you can’t afford to miss.

Frequently bought together

Wall Street Versus America: The Rampant Greed and Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments

$10.99

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Ships from and sold by musicogswell books & more.

+

Born to Steal: When the Mafia Hit Wall Street

$18.68

Get it as soon as Wednesday, May 15

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by Sofos2019 and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Gary Weiss
97
Hardcover
1 offer from $18.68
Gary Weiss
467
Hardcover
32 offers from $6.28

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. (Apr. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If you're like half of America, and you own stocks, either directly or through mutual funds, IRAs, or 401(k)s, you may not want to hear what Weiss has to say about the industry--but you'd better read it anyway, for your own good. Weiss, an award-winning investigative journalist, formerly with Business Week, refuses to toe the party line. He describes practices we thought were confined to the fringe dark side of The Street, such as boiler room fraud; overpaid, uncaring fund managers; ineffectual SEC regulations; and Wild West-style hedge funds. The wall that is supposed to separate CEOs, analysts, underwriters, and the media has long disappeared, according to Weiss, as these forces cozy up to form a coalition designed to separate you from your money. If this all sounds too tough to beat, Weiss describes a way to fight back--for instance, place funds in an unmanaged index fund and beat more than half the managers "playing" the market right off the bat. Traders will enjoy the behind-the-scenes look at the war between short sellers and just about everybody else. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio Hardcover (April 6, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1591840945
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591840947
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.28 x 1.18 x 9.26 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,516,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19,580 in Finance (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 18 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Gary Weiss

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Gary Weiss has uncovered financial wrongdoing since the 1990s.

Retail Gangster (Hachette Books, August 23, 2022), his fourth book, is an inside look at Eddie Antar---a marketing genius who turned a tiny Brooklyn store into the heart of a corporate empire, the largest retailer of consumer electronics in the northeast. Its name was Crazy Eddie.

Wall Street swooned. The press fell in line. The public flocked to his stores. Only a few people knew that this wildly popular retail chain was built on fraud. Just about everyone who fell in love with Eddie---from his customers to investment bankers to close members of his family--were also his prey.

Yet when he died in 2016, there was an outpouring of grief and nostalgia. How was that possible? As described in Retail Gangster, Eddie was a crook unlike any other in history.

A product of exhaustive research, Retail Gangster is more than just the story of a criminal mastermind and his often wacky schemes. It is the story of a vanished blue-collar New York.

Weiss's first book Born to Steal (Grand Central: 2003), described the Mafia's takeover of brokerage houses in the 1990s. Wall Street Versus America (Portfolio: 2006) is a detailed account of investor rip-offs.Ayn Rand Nation (St. Martin's, 2012) tells the story of how large segments of American society fell under the thrall of a Russian-born extremist.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5

18 global ratings

2 star

0%

1 star

11%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

LoyalCustomerFor20years

Well-researched and illuminating

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2006

Verified Purchase

Gary Weiss's Wall Street Versus America : The Rampant Greed and Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments is a well-researched and illuminating account of Wall Street's standard practice to rip-off small investors. It exposes all parties from the small and big Wall Street brokerages all the way to the regulators that allegedly look-out for small investors.

Before the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, pretty much only the wealthiest Americans were invested in the market, so Wall Street was confined to rip-off only the wealthiest.

After the Crash, the US Government instituted various rules and policies. Most notably it instituted Self-Regulatory Organizations like the NASD. NYSE, etc. and the government regulatory organization The SEC. The former are nothing more than industry trade groups looking out for the industry. The later is a lax government institution that does a better job protecting Wall Street than the individual investor. Indeed, the first head of the SEC was Wall Street tycoon who made millions of dollars manipulating stocks.

The changes were only a shell game. With the rise of pensions, etc, almost everyone is invested in the markets. So Wall Street traded blatant cons of a relatively small number of rich Americans for more subtle cons of all Americans.

For the past thirty or so years Wall Street even started running its own self-styled justice system under the name of arbitration. The system is completely rigged in favor of Wall Street. Investors rarely receive justice. And Wall Street evades the law, avoids punishment, and conceals any negative publicity that might spur real regulation or at least more investor skepticism.

Unfortunately Wall Street is not just ripping off small investors. It is ripping off supposedly savvy corporations as well as infecting corporations with its own dishonest, money-grubbing culture.

Weiss's book should be required reading for the legislators in Washington DC.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Arden Rynew

You can't judge a book by its cover

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2013

Verified Purchase

You can't judge a book by its cover. But I did want to read this book. While its contents didn't live up to what I expected, I did get this book at a good price. I would buy from this seller again, while I will have some doubts to ever buying this authors materials.

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

I found it boring and repetitive, couldn't finish it

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Hank Progar

Arrived in good shape in a timely manner

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2021

Verified Purchase

Arrived in good shape in a timely manner

Helpful

Joseph Goodman

Decent effort but boring damn read.

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2006

Some books are vast in scope and others are half-vast. This is sadly a rather half-vast effort. Reading it I couldn't help but think that the author was given an advance, a deadline, and a minimum word count to meet and that's it. Otherwise it's hard to understand how something so unorignial and meandering ended up in book form.

That said, I'll commend the author for doing the institutional and market research, most of which was probably valid, but I'll ask him at the same time why it felt necessary to rehash the work of so many other solid Wall Street writers who've said all this already, and certainly more succinctly.

Buy this if your curiousity is overwhelming, but not until you've crossed everything off your "to read" list first.

21 people found this helpful

Helpful

Harmon

Now I know...

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2008

Verified Purchase

I am only about 3/4 the way through this book, but had I read it a few years ago, I probably wouldn't have stock investments and wouldn't have seen my retirement funds go down the tube as they have.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Pamela K. Martens

A Work of Historical Dimension

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2006

One of the most controversial aspects of "Wall Street Versus America" by Gary Weiss is the author's assessment that SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt was not the champion of the small investor as the press made him out to be; that, in fact, he aided and abetted the abuses against the small investor by refusing to curtail the corrupt practices on Wall Street. Weiss' assessment of Levitt is tersely summed up in the opening pages: "Levitt presided over the worst abuses to descend upon Wall Street since the 1920s. He failed miserably at dealing with the problems that he did not ignore entirely, but he did a couple of things better than just about any recent SEC chairman in history - give speeches, and court the press."

And this is the crux of what makes "Wall Street Versus America" a work of historical dimension. Each of the Wall Street abuses detailed in the book, most of which continue to this day, were by themselves a fraud on the public investor. But together, they rendered Wall Street not a fair and efficient capital allocation system but an institutionalized wealth transfer system. No book has, heretofore, shown this so clearly. Wealth was sucked from the masses of little investors and transferred to the corporate and Wall Street insiders while the cop on the beat, the SEC, looked the other way.

I recently retired after 21 years on Wall Street, during which time I made numerous written appeals to the SEC, the Fed, and in GAO testimony to halt the same areas of corruption covered in "Wall Street Versus America:" the rigged arbitration system; the 1920s style creation of conflict-riddled mega banks/brokerages; the rampant kickback schemes with lofty sounding names. One word aptly describes the outcome of each of my appeals: coverup. Thus, I am not surprised that Weiss has borne the brunt of threats and backlash for this comprehensive and courageous work.

For those skeptics who can't believe that "Wall Street Versus America" is a keenly insightful and accurate portrayal of the corruption-riddled practices of the largest and most lauded financial system in the world, here's background to digest before you move on to the main feature: "Wall Street Versus America."

In a 1994 article by Business Week (4/4/1994: Beware the IPO Market) regulators had

the goods to clean up the systemic looting of American investors by bulge bracket Wall Street firms and their cronies. The article quotes Lynn A. Stout, professor of securities regulation at Georgetown University Law Center: "The IPO [Initial Public Offering] market is rigged. It's rigged against the average investor." The article goes on to define exactly how a "penalty bid" works. "This is a penalty imposed on brokers who flip or sell their customers IPO shares right after the offering. The practice, devised by a group of top Wall Street firms during Securities Industry Association meetings in the 1980s, is used by underwriters to help prop up the stock price of an IPO in the sensitive weeks following its issue. Brokers whose customers flip, risk having their commissions taken away, giving them an incentive to discourage customers from selling out." The article points out, however, that the Wall Street firm's institutional clients were allowed to cash out while the individual investors are left "holding the bag" and serving as a prop under the price of the shares.

Two and a half years later, the Wall Street Journal took up the issue of the penalty bid. (12/2/1996: Tough IPO Market Triggers Penalty Bids Against Brokers by Deborah Lohse) "Even though penalty bids are taken out of brokers' commission, many investors gripe that they are the ones being penalized, since their brokers exert subtle, or not so subtle, pressure on them not to sell their IPO shares while the penalty bid is in place."

One and half years later comes Michael Siconolfi and Patrick McGeehan in the Wall Street Journal, who decide to take the gloves off on this penalty bid issue. (6/26/1998: Big Institutions Can Cash Out Quickly; the Little Guy Can't Without Penalties) "It's one of Wall Street's best kept secrets: While securities firms allow big institutional investors to dump hot new stocks at their whim, often within hours or minutes of the stock's first trade, they try to persuade investors to hold on to IPOs, for better or worse." This article clearly points out that while the little investor continues to be fleeced, the SEC has its lens fogged.

It's now March of 2001. It's seven years since Business Week first tipped off the regulators and the Wall Street Journal reporters did everything short of filing the brief and buying the handcuffs. And there are no more hot IPOs. There are only drowning IPOs. Ron Chernow in the New York Times summed it up: "Let us be clear about the magnitude of the Nasdaq collapse. The tumble has been so steep and so bloody - close to $4 trillion in market value erased in one year - that it amounts to nearly four times the carnage recorded in the October 1987 crash." Chernow likens the NASDAQ to a "lunatic control tower that directed most incoming planes to a bustling, congested airport known as the New Economy while another, depressed airport, the Old Economy, stagnated with empty runways. The market functioned as a vast, erratic mechanism for misallocating capital across America."

This misallocation of capital, capital that should have been feeding American innovation to secure our economic future but went instead to build millions of miles of unneeded fibre optic cables or now bankrupt dot.coms while shifting wealth to such unprecedented levels of concentration in America as to threaten our democracy, can be placed squarely at the feet of Arthur Levitt's SEC.

That most of these practices continue unabated today means Gary Weiss needs to start work on a sequel immediately and that regardless of who is sitting in the oval office, there's likely to be a Wall Street crony at the helm of the SEC.

Pam Martens

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

Wall Street Versus America: The Rampant Greed and Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments Hardcover – April 6, 2006

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Booklist

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Gary Weiss

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.