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Journal.com -- Sept. 2010
Trupp, Phil. Ruthless:
How Enraged Investors Reclaimed Their Investments and Beat
Wall Street. Wiley. Sept. 2010. c.313p. index. ISBN 9780470579893.
$27.95. BUS
Trupp, an experienced
news journalist, invested in auction-rate securities (ARS)
around 2007 after being assured by his Wachovia broker that
these debt obligations were safe and could be sold easily.
Trupp explains that when the ARS market crashed in February
2008, he and over 100,000 other investors were left with some
$336 billion in illiquid ARS. Trupp recounts his anger and
tells of his odyssey to get redress for himself and other
ARS investors. He heaps criticism on the greed of Wall Street,
lax government regulation, and the mandatory arbitration process
of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which
he claims is stacked against investors. Trupp retells investor
stories and how he helped publicize the ARS problem over the
Internet when traditional media failed to air the problem.
As a result of the pressure brought by investors and state
regulators, more than half of the ARS had been redeemed at
the time of his writing. VERDICT Business-oriented readers
who can get past Trupp's numerous angry rants will find his
first-person account instructive of how Wall Street and regulators
betrayed the trust of so many ARS investors.—Lawrence
R. Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA
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