Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market

Dan Reingold spent fourteen years as a top analyst in the telecom sector, competing directly with Salomon Smith Barney's Jack Grubman. Initially committed to Wall Street, Reingold's perspective shifted as he witnessed the deep corruption that took hold during the 1990s stock market bubble. This memoir offers an insider's account of financial history during a dramatic and ultimately tragic period. Reingold describes his exposure to leaks and secret deal-making, corporate fraud, and Wall Street's culture of excessive spending and multimillion-dollar compensation packages. He recounts conflicts with rival Grubman, pressure from bankers and corporate executives, and interactions with figures like Morgan Stanley's John Mack and CSFB's Frank Quattrone. The narrative includes his discovery of WorldCom's accounting fraud, his inadvertent role in sexually explicit e-mails that damaged Grubman's career and led to Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill's departure, and his observation that government investigators failed to fully address the era's ethical and legal violations. Reingold portrays Wall Street as a system driven by greed and ego, filled with conflicts of interest and inside information, fundamentally disconnected from the broader economy it serves.