Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008, Donald Trump looked forward to a crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” he said.

Our future president wasn’t alone. While millions of Americans suffered financial loss, tycoons pounced to heartlessly seize thousands of homes – their profiteering made even easier because, as Reveal’s Aaron Glantz uncovers, they often used taxpayer money and the Obama administration’s promise to cover their losses.

Glantz’s work on housing and inequality already has been honored with a Peabody Award and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, he’s out with a new book, “Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.” Published by Custom House, it’s the first major piece of investigative reporting to explain who won when millions of Americans lost everything.

Glantz vividly tells how a group of Wall Street bankers and private equity titans whom he calls the “Homewreckers” – including Trump cabinet members Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, as well as Trump confidants and funders Steve Schwarzman, Tom Barrack and others – exploited a rigged system in which billions of dollars in wealth was transferred to them from millions of individual homeowners after the real estate bust of the Great Recession. Furthermore, Glantz reveals how many of these same people now are working to weaken the safeguards that were put in place to prevent a similar disaster and how proven programs from our history can be used to create systemic change in favor of the public rather than the Homewreckers.