Other People's Money The Corporate Mugging of America

"The thing I learned in Washington is that just as important, or more so, as what you do is who you do it with." ?Hank Paulson, CEO Goldman Sachs

After fifteen years in the banking industry, Nomi Prins brings an insider?s eye to the boom economy, uncovering the old-boy networks and hot-money flows between Wall Street, Corporate America, and Capitol Hill, and exposing the whitewash reforms brought in to control them.

In the first years of the Bush administration, some of America?s most prominent corporate executives cashed out billions of dollars in stock and stock options before driving their companies to ruin through fraud and bankruptcy. In their wake they left a tangle of lost jobs, depleted pensions, and shattered lives. Yet, to write off this corruption as the unbridled greed of a select few is an oversimplification. As Nomi Prins shows in this devastating exposé, the much-publicized corporate malfeasance of recent years resulted from deregulation that trashed the rules of responsible corporate behavior. Faced with increasingly absent regulatory agencies, toothless legislation, and an utter lack of accountability, the stock market roared on the back of phony balance sheets while the executives made out like bandits.

Nomi Prins has held posts as Managing Director at Goldman Sachs and Senior Managing Director at Bear Stearns, as well as senior positions at Lehman Brothers and the Chase Manhattan Bank. She has written for Fortune, Newsday, The Guardian, Left Business Observer, and La Vanguardia. She lives in New York.



? Between 1998 and 2001, 1,000 top corporate executives cashed out $66 billion. In 2001 alone, public pension and 401(k) plans lost $200 billion.

? During California?s electricity crises in 2000 and 2002, the public lost over $45 billion, while corporate energy companies paid only $450 million in fines.

? Since 2001, the average value of a CEO severance package has been $3 million, while the average worker?s severance pay following the bankruptcy of their company was less than $5,000.

? Between 2000 and 2001, the average CEO compensation of Fortune 500 companies was $37.5 million, while the average worker salary of all companies was $38,000.