Faber, a financial industries reporter who hosts The Faber Report, a CNBC segment, promotes an aggressively skeptical attitude in his first book. Predicated on what he calls Wall Street's core conflict of interest—investment firms that analyze companies and also hope to do banking business with them—Faber's work critically addresses the current economy. Analysts often assign ratings to stocks, not based on actual value, Faber says, but with an eye toward bringing in millions in fees for their own firms (and, by extension, themselves). He organizes his book as a series of case studies of how various companies' stocks were presented to the public, at times referring to the players simply as Big Firm X and Company A. Playing up his broadcast journalism background, Faber punctuates the finance talk by inserting pointed sidebars on understanding hedge funds and price/earnings ratios, profiles of high flyers like Lucent CEO Rich McGinn and even some Enron gossip. It's refreshing to see Faber's cynicism toward the industry he covers, but his tortured rationalization for why he has continued is unexpectedly touching: "of the many thousands of bankers, traders, money managers, and brokers I've spoken to, not one came to Wall Street in order to do good for his or her fellow man," he says in the introduction. "But... I would counter," he writes later, "that it is better than anything else I've seen." Faber has penned a helpful, instructive book with appropriate amounts of doubt and optimism. Agents, David Vigliano and Dean Williamson. (June 1)
