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 the Author
William David Cohan (born February 20, 1960) is an American business writer. He has written three books about business and economics and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.Prior to becoming a journalist, he worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch & Co., and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration.In 1991 he married editor Deborah Gail Futter in a Jewish ceremony.In 2007, he publishedThe Last Tycoons The Secret History of Lazard Frères Co., about Lazard Frères. It won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.His bookHouse of Cards A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, describing the last days of Bear Stearns & Co., was published in March 2009. The book has received excellent reviews and was described as a "masterfully reported account" by Tim Rutten in The Los Angeles Times. It remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for several months.In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Cohan said in March 2009 that Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz and Lehman CEO Dick Fuld had engaged in a "tsunami of excuses" when they were responsible for their firms' collapse. In another op-ed written with Sandy B. Lewis in June 2009 he said that the current economic crisis is not over yet, and that "many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse."His 2011 book,Money and Power How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, examines the historical role and influence of Goldman Sachs.His new book,The Price of Silence The Duke Lacrosse Scandal the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities, about the story of the Duke lacrosse case, was published in 2014 by Scribner.
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