Ruthless How Enraged Investors Reclaimed Their Investments and Beat Wall Street

Ruthless is a candid exploration of the criminal subculture of Wall Street, and one of the first books to speak for the victims of this financial meltdown. On February 14, 2008, author Phil Trupp received a call from my broker telling him his investments were frozen--on ice--essentially leaving him broke. When the fog started to clear, Trupp realized he was one of many investors caught up in what experts called the greatest attempted securities fraud in the history of the world--a $336 billion scam which made the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s look like a simple street mugging.The path to destruction, financial or otherwise, often begins with a simple proposition. For author Phil Trupp it came from his stock broker: "Take it, Phil. It's free money." This free money came from auction-rate securities (ARS), Auction Rate Securities are corporate or municipal bonds with a long-term maturity for which the interest rate is reset at auction. Since 2008, most auctions have failed and this market has been largely frozen. The victims ranged from individual investors to the Joffee Foundation, a nonprofit that can no longer fund programs that help prevent AIDS in Africa, to The Port Authority of New York.While this is a classic 21st century tale of Wall Street greed and betrayal, it also is a story of redemption and the life-altering struggle of tens of thousands of American investors who, in the end, beat the Wall Street fraud-masters. Ruthless is the story of how individual investors became mad as hell and joined together to beat Wall Street, and reclaim their investments. A lively, page-turning guide for any investor with a stunning lesson on how to fight back.

PHIL TRUPP is a veteran investigative journalist, and the author of many books, including Sea of Dreamers: Travels with Famous Ocean Explorers and Tracking Treasure: Romance & Fortune Beneath the Sea and How to Find It! He is also a regular commentator for New York Times Dealbook and New York Magazine Online, as well as a weekly contributor to www.auctionratepreferreds.org, the Internet's top site on auction-rate securities (ARS). Trupp was assistant bureau chief of Fairchild Publications/ABC CapCities, where he covered the White House, Pentagon, Supreme Court, Treasury, NASA, and the Federal Reserve, and, today, lectures on "The Future of Journalism" at American and Georgetown Universities.