House of Cards A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street

House of Cards A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street

“Engrossing….[Cohan] gives us in these pages a chilling, almost minute-by-minute account of the 10, vertigo-inducing days that one year ago revealed Bear Stearns to be a flimsy house of cards in a perfect storm….He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place….turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping — and almost immediately comprehensible — to the lay reader….riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It’s a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders….hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders” –BusinessWeek

“Masterfully reported….[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists….he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation…the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author’s interviews…Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It’s impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review…” – Los Angeles Times

“A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM).” — The Economist

“A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion–a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today….meticulous reporting…..first drafts of history don’t get much better than this” –Bloomberg

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars A let down!!
I am a wall street buff, and consider reading and keeping up with the market a hobby.This book throws it all at you.Drama,facts that only

a person from Wall Street would understand.The story line is bushed all together, all kind of things are happenibg simultaneously.The story line is not laid out in a way you can keep up what is going on.Extremely disappointed, this could have been a good read.

4 Stars Very accurate account
This book is a very accurate account of the events leading up to the fall of the financial services industry. It’s pretty scary to witness from an outsider’s perspective, but to basically be inside the heads of the people that made the decisions is even worse. Must read for people who are interested in a modern piece of history

5 Stars Limited in scope but fascinating read
When I ordered the book I thought it would be a comprehensive look at “what went wrong and why” in the financial services sector. Instead, it concentrates nearly exclusively on Bear-Stearns. That said, this is a very insightful book in respect to the culture of Wall Street, warts and all, and in the second half of the book it does trace via the history of Bear the emergence of factors that ultimately led to Bear’s downfall, and months later the now infamous generalized meltdown. Cohan writes with an insider’s insight and obvious knowledge of his topic, and apparently got a lot of interviews with principal players. My one regret is that there isn’t a sort of index of terminology, since I’m not a trader/investor myself and some of terms escaped me. But that’s a minor quirk. This is a fascinating and ultimately enlightening read, though perhaps not as revelatory as it would have been had it come out before all the house of cards crumbled. What I was left with was the conflict between people working in the field (not to mention the huge of amounts of personal wealth) and the awesome and dangerous “power” that this industry has acquired.

5 Stars Fraud on Wall Street
This book tells the story of the downfall of Bear Stearns. Always a place that marched to its own tune, it become a place of deceit for some of its players in the mortgage markets, while the poohbahs traveled around the country to play championship bridge! (I wish I were making the bridge thing up.) They fired the most experienced mortgage experts in the midst of the crisis. And in their heyday a couple years before the company exploded, their top managers were paid — not just among the most on Wall Street — but THE most on the Street. They took while the taking was good without realizing the serious troubles brewing in some of their “minor” funds.

Outside government officials who tried to help the beleaguered investment bank included Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed Chairman Bernanke and then NY Fed chief Tim Geithner.

Do those names sound familiar? Yes, many of these people are trying to fix the same issues in our economy today. The usual suspects. May they do better with the country than they did with Bear Stearns.

Those who feel that the Fed is too involved in trying to fix a normal business cycle should read this book. In fact, too many of the people involved sometimes act like the captain of the SS Carpathia — the ship that ignored the unsinkable Titanic’s distress calls.

Highly recommended story of greed and deceit and how to make a silk purse out of subprime mortgage investments.

5 Stars House of Cards
Great Seller. Fast shipment. Superior quality product. Highly recommend doing business with the seller.

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