Street wise.

• Author: Mayer, Jane
• Position: Take On the Street: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don't Want You to Know. What You Can Do To Fight Back - Book Review

TAKE ON THE STREET: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don't Want You to Know. What You Can Do To Fight Back by Arthur Levitt Jr. and Paula Dwyer Pantheon, $24.95

BEFORE HE MADE MILLIONS ton Wall Street and went on to become, under Bill Clinton, the longest-serving chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in history (the one who famously attempted to reform notoriously resistant accounting standards), Arthur Levitt Jr. had another ambition. He wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Williams College, he got a job reviewing plays for a small newspaper in the Berkshires. Levitt's father, however, New York State's even-longer-serving comptroller, Arthur Levitt Sr., was a practical man. He had counseled his only son against going to law school, because he felt the profession didn't pay well enough. One can only imagine what he thought of journalism. At any rate, young Levitt didn't dally long in the profession, throwing in his lot instead with some other young men such as Sanford Weill, now the chairman of Citigroup, and Arthur Carter, now publisher of the New York Observer, to found what would become the thriving Shearson Lehman stock brokerage firm. But now, after a full and bountiful career, Levitt has apparently decided to go back to his first love. The result is a book co-authored with Business Week reporter Paula Dwyer, Take On The Street: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don't Want You To Know. What You Can Do To Fight Back.

The book is sometimes as unwieldy as its title, crammed with information aimed at pleasing virtually everyone from expert to novice, of use to both the first-time investor and the experienced policy wonk. But to the surprise, perhaps, of those who see Levitt as a silver-haired establishmentarian, what he has written is in essence an expose, laying bare an amazing array of traps and rip-offs that await unsuspecting investors. To his credit, long before Enron, Tyco, and the rest of the corporate scandals caught the public eye, Levitt had already devoted much of his career in public service to serving the millions of small investors who have flooded the markets during the past decade, whose lack of sophistication, knowledge, and connections left them at the mercy of unscrupulous insiders. The typical American stock owner, Levitt points out, is no longer particularly wealthy, with an average income of $65,000 and total household assets of $85,000 (and that was before the recent market downturn)...