You Got Screwed!
Why Wall Street Tanked and How You Can Prosper
-
- $21.99
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
Personal finance expert, bestselling author, and host of CNBC’s Mad Money Jim Cramer offers advice on how to restore your financial health and how to work the Wall Street system—not work against it.
You’ve been screwed. You’ve been bludgeoned, skewered, crushed, mutilated by the stock market. Every day you read about another corporate scandal: loans to CEOs that didn’t have to be repaid, sham accounting irregularities, profits that never existed. You think the stock market must have been rigged. And you’re right.
You were betrayed by the stock promotion machine. The mutual fund managers, the brokers, analysts, strategists, and stock gurus who brainwashed you into buying and holding stocks aren’t coming to your rescue. So now what do you do? Where do you put your money? You can't just leave it in the bank or stuff it under the mattress.
For fourteen years Jim Cramer ran a hedge fund that compounded money at a rate of twenty-four percent annually after fees, and then he got out at the end of 2000. He knows that there are ways to make money, smart ways that don’t require you to own stocks blindly. There are other investments that won’t send you to the poorhouse.
This book will tell you what went wrong, who the bad guys were, and what you have to do to restore your financial health. You can’t just close your eyes. Ignoring Wall Street isn’t the answer. Cash alone isn’t the answer. But Jim Cramer has the answers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If you invested money in the last five years, chances are you lost some of it. Or even all of it. Rounds of layoffs at ill-conceived dot-coms may no longer be making headlines, but the toppling of behemoths WorldCom and Enron have alerted investors to the pitfalls of unprincipled accounting. In this little book, the outspoken commentator and cofounder of TheStreet.com breaks down how such widely touted companies got away with blatant fraud and why investors got screwed in the process. Cramer (Confessions of a Street Addict) uses WorldCom's Hindenburg-like plummet to illustrate how unscrupulous analysts hyped stocks they knew were already overvalued in return for hefty compensation. He goes after Jack Grubman, former analyst for Salomon Smith Barney, who "was the chief proselytizer for unrelenting, ineluctable, telecommunications growth." Grubman's success as an industry cheerleader got the better of WorldCom after he hyped its competitors. Turning his gaze to Enron, Cramer dissects this infamous corporate disaster. He examines who was really at fault, considering Ken Lay, Arthur Andersen, the SEC and Congress. He concludes, "maybe it was just everyone because Enron represented... a wholesale breakdown of every aspect of the legal, accounting, governmental and regulatory bulwark meant to keep corporate America honest." Without condescension, this compact volume serves as an easy-to-read manual on prudent investing as well as a deep if opinionated analysis of major bungles in recent business history.
