If we’re to believe
the reviews, then award-winning investigative journalist,
Bruce Livesey, has written a book every Canadian Occupy activist should read. The
Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks, Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions from Canadians, portrays Canada’s financial industry as a haven for fraud. The
National Post tells us the book “exposes a gang of rogues who infected the heart of Canada’s financial core: corrupt corporate managers, derelict bankers, plundering stock brokers, hedge-fund manipulators, inactive regulators and distracted prosecutors.”
Beneath the veneer of stability that saw Canada’s banking sector through the financial crash of 2008, investigative reporter Bruce Livesey has uncovered a rampant failure of epidemic proportions. Though no large financial institution has recently gone bust in this country, white-collar criminals, scam artists, Ponzi schemers and organized crime, from the Hells Angels to the Russian mafia, know that Canada is the place in the Western world to rip off investors. And the fraudsters do so with little fear of being caught and punished.
Thieves of Bay Street investigates Canada’s biggest financial scandals of recent years. Readers will learn what banks do with investors’ money and what happens when they lose it. They will meet the bogus investment gurus, the brokers who lose money with both reckless abandon and impunity, the bankers who squander money in toxic investments, the lawyers who protect them and the regulators who do nothing to keep them from doing it again. And most importantly, they’ll meet the victims who are demanding that our vaunted banking sector finally come clean on its dirtiest secret.
About the Author:
Bruce Livesy is an award-winning investigative journalist. His writing has appeared in most major magazines and newspapers in Canada, including
The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine, National Post, Toronto Star, The Gazette, The Walrus, Canadian Business, Canadian Lawyer and
The Financial Post.
Livesey also has extensive experience working in television. He spent six years as an associate producer at CBC TV’s the fifth estate and then as a producer working for the investigative unit of The National, the fifth estate and CBC News Sunday. He has also worked outside Canada for a co-production of PBS’s Frontline and the New York Times and directed documentaries for Al Jazeera English, Discovery Channel and Al Gore’s Current TV.
Livesey is a co-winner of a Dupont Award, one of the most prestigious U.S. television awards, a Canadian Association of Journalism (CAJ) award, and has been nominated for two Geminis and three National Magazine Awards, winning in 2008. He lives in Toronto with his wife. Thieves of Bay Street is his first book.
Livesey also writes a blog on economics for the Progressive Economics Forum.
