House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism - Hardcover

Cohan, William D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846141958 ISBN 13: 9781846141959

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2009

Synopsis

On the evening of March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling eighty-five-year-old institution in the financial world, sold itself for an outrageously low price to the $2 trillion global behemoth JP Morgan Chase. Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun. What went wrong?

In House of Cards bestselling author and former investment banker William Cohan gives the reader a front-row seat at Wall Street's catastrophic unravelling at the seams, and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Through the prism of Bear Stearns, he shows how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making have wrought havoc on the world financial system.

Cohan's minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, as the US government and federal bank began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.

But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company's fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company's leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear's huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.

Full of insider knowledge and larger-than-life characters, such as Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns' miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman and his profane, colorful rival Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and the firm's demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won in the end, House of Cards is a shocking tale of greed, arrogance and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.

About this title

Review:

First drafts of history don't get much better than this.

Synopsis:

On the evening of March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling 85-year-old institution in the financial world, sold itself for an outrageously low price to JP Morgan Chase, the $2 trillion global behemoth. Bestselling author and former investment banker William D. Cohan gives the reader a front-row seat to Bear Stearn's catastrophic unraveling at the seams in a narrative that reads like a thriller. Bear Stearn's demise involved subtle strands of blame that stretch around the globe. "House of Cards" shows how the Bear Sterns saga was a microcosm of the disastrous financial bust that followed an irrational boom. That boom had 'the Bear' clocking in a record-high stock price, with Wall Street honchos throwing parties that would make Marie Antoinette blush for their blatant extravagance.Then the slumping housing market and hedge funds' bad bets on sub-prime mortgages swept into the market, and suddenly the once-flush Bear Stearns and other financial institutions were struggling to stay afloat. As Bear Sterns' stock price spiralled downward, an internal battle to find a scapegoat ensued, with all the drama of a daytime soap and backstabbing galore.

"House of Cards" is a delicious narrative about corporate greed on a truly epic scale. Cohan relates how the lack of foresight and regulation in an uncertain economy forced the government and Wall Street to take increasingly desperate and unprecedented measures to stop the carnage before the entire economy melted down.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1846141958
• ISBN 13: 9781846141959
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480