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HOUSE OF CARDS
A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street

$27.95

The author, an investigative journalist who later worked on Wall Street, chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and how the financial meltdown of 2008 started.

William D. Cohan gives a minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March when bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to keep the company from going bankrupt.

Mr. Cohan worked on Wall Street for 17 years. He spent six years at Lazard Frčres in New York and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also wrote The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frčres & Co., which won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

“Two things stand out in Mr. Cohan’s narrative. The first has to do with just how worried some Wall Street analysts and the federal government were about the liquidity crisis and the possibility of a domino-like collapse in the world financial markets in March 2008, six months before things really began to slide out of control in the fall, and just how many earlier warning signs there were in 2007, 2006 and even 2005 about the housing bubble and sub-prime mortgages. The second has to do with the power of the so-called butterfly effect (in which the flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings can lead to a gigantic storm) in a globalized, interconnected world, where rumors fly around the planet by television and the Internet, where automated computer programs can magnify or speed up trends, where bad decisions made by a handful of powerful people can ricochet through a company or industry.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“… meticulous piece of reporting. Drawing on interviews with bank executives, central bankers, government officials, investors and analysts, he weaves a narrative from published accounts, e-mail exchanges, court documents and direct quotations from the likes of Cayne, Dimon and Timothy Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now U.S. Treasury secretary.” —James Pressley, Bloomberg

“… a riveting, blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the governmentbacked shotgun wedding [with JP Morgan], based on interviews with more than 120 of those who lived through it… Mr. Cohan handles his material deftly, portraying Bear as symptomatic of an industry that had come to believe its own hype and had lost sight of how inherently unstable it really was.” —The Economist

“It’s a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders.” —Roben Farzad, BusinessWeek •