The corporate Mugging of America
Are We There Yet? Best Business Books 2004
Exceedingly well documented, this fascinating tale breaks down the interconnected relationships among corporations, Wall Street, and government regulators. Prins, who has worked for such prestigious firms as Goldman Sachs and Bear Sterns, shows us how executives walked away with big money while ordinary folks lose their pensions, savings, and jobs through Congress's systematic deregulation of the industry. - The Library Journal , March 15, 2005.
Books of the year 2004 - Feet up, volume down
We chose the year's best books in 2004 .
An insider’s tale of how Wall Street went off the rails during the late 1990s. Nomi Prins details the pernicious effects of a failure properly to manage the conflicts of interest at the heart of the financial system. In the process, she provides the most revealing description yet of what it is like to work for the mighty Goldman Sachs, her employer during the stockmarket bubble.” - The Economist, November 29 - December 3, 2004 issue
Best Books of 2004
No holiday book list would be complete without at least one tell-all -- and we'll tell you of two. Other People's Money by Nomi Prins (New Press, 297 pages, $26.95) gives a unique and not especially reassuring view of the top ranks of U.S. finance by a former top executive at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Prins delivers a giddy romp through the old-boy networks and unending power plays of Wall Street, Corporate America and Capitol Hill. - Barron's, December 20, 2004.
Former Wall Street banker Nomi Prins is well positioned to describe how all this happened. Having worked at the top echelons of several Wall Street firms in the lead-up to the crash, she witnessed much of the chicanery up close. Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America describes in head-spinning (but compulsively readable) detail how Enron and other companies gamed the system, using labrynthine networks of shell companies, astute political maneuvering, and outright fraud to make their officers incredibly rich, leaving everyone else to foot the bill. - The Brooklyn Rail, January 2005
(PDF)Robbing U.S. Blind
In Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (The New Press), Prins goes into great detail describing factors that created the system in which these scandals were allowed to occur...She provides a well-thought-out and detailed argument while using a simple, clear style. Anyone interested in how deep the corporate scandals go and how they could happen again would find many of their answers in this book. - Christopher Dowsett, Streetwise (PDF)Strategic Finance, February 2005 issue
Worth Noting
Of late, there have been an abundance of books attacking questionable or shabby business practices, but this one stands out. What makes it remarkable is that the author has held senior positions at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Chase Manhattan Bank. When Prins speaks, then, it is with an insider's authority as well as an activist's anger. And anger there is plenty of in in Other People's Money: anger directed against investment bankers' "cocoon of self-worth and entitlement," against accoutning fraud, at the failure of regulatory agencies and Congress to cope with corporate malfeasance, and at the media itself, which she charges with collusion ("positioning stories on indictments as if justice is being done; at the same time they do much less to publicize shareholder activism or class-action victories in the face of corruption." - Across the Board, January/February 2005 issue
Greed and Amnesia on Wall Street
The fallout from the end of the 1990s bull run - nervous markets and soaring redundancies - is still being felt.
FROM the same imprint as Doug Henwood's excoriating look at the end of the 1990s bull run, After the New Economy, comes another timely reminder of that period of stockmarket excess.
And like Henwood, Nomi Prins sees the era as important precisely because so little appears to have been learned.
It was an era she witnessed first-hand, working first in London for Bear Stearns and then for Goldman Sachs in New York, arriving at what would prove to be the market's peak in early 2000.
Over the next two years, she watched as the markets fell and redundancies soared, while value evaporated as corporations sought to take the cash and run. In this unseemly scramble, the corrupt practices at the heart of some of the biggest "new economy" companies quickly unravelled. (PDF)Full article...
- Neville Smith, Lloyd's List
Another Brick in the Wall
...Nomi Prins' book surpassed all my expectations both in the style it is written in and the information that she provides...Her book tells, with immaculate detail and precision, the engrossing and horrifying tale of the corruption involved in a number of high flying corporations. Full article...
- Natalie Roper, Socialist Review, December 2004
Whistleblower's Tale of Deception and Power
...When the going got rough, some of the country's most prominent corporate leaders cut and ran, cashed out small fortunes in stock options and then deliberately drove their companies bankrupt.
Their unfortunate employees were left with no jobs, depleted pensions and in many cases, shattered lives. Much of the book consists of a brisk run through of the worst offenders, the most prominent of whom (Ken Lay, Martha Stewart) will be familiar to anyone reads the business pages.
The real value of Prins' narrative, however, lies in the firsthand details she is able to provide about life in the financial sector, with its routine deceptions and intense power plays...
Other People's Money has plenty of interesting things to say about the tangled relationships between corporations, Wall Street and government regulators. And unlike most books about money, the writing is consistently lively and occasionally humorous. - Andrew Lynch, The Sunday Business Post, October 31, 2004.
Nomi Prins was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs until she chose exile to tell the rest of us how that realm of princely wealth accumulation actually works. This is not a pretty story -- how Wall Street helped corporate rogues bilk the nation -- but it's as fascinating as a great crime story in which the culprits get away with larceny on an epic scale.
-William Greider, author, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Nomi Prins’ work brings together a social justice perspective and a rigorous financial methodology. Her self-interested critics in Corporate America and Wall Street will find it difficult to challenge her analysis, since she knows more about the mechanics of the trickery they've used than they do themselves.
-John Dizard, Financial Times