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

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

3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 · rating details · 1,717 ratings · 178 reviews

On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter...more On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.

How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making 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, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke 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.

The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).

Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.

Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.(less)

Hardcover, 480 pages

Published March 10th 2009 by Doubleday (first published January 1st 2009)

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Oct 06, 2011 Kemper rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, bidness, history, politics, non-fiction

After I read Too Big to Fail, I just hadn’t gotten enough stories about greedy assholes so I figured I‘d read this to angry up my blood some more.

Actually, Too Big to Fail began after the Bear Stearns meltdown so even though there was some background there, I felt like I hadn’t gotten the whole story so I picked this up to try and complete the picture. The two books dovetail nicely with this one concentrating on the history of Bear Stearns and how it became the warning alarm that something bad...more After I read Too Big to Fail, I just hadn’t gotten enough stories about greedy assholes so I figured I‘d read this to angry up my blood some more.

Actually, Too Big to Fail began after the Bear Stearns meltdown so even though there was some background there, I felt like I hadn’t gotten the whole story so I picked this up to try and complete the picture. The two books dovetail nicely with this one concentrating on the history of Bear Stearns and how it became the warning alarm that something bad was coming when it started circling the drain and had to be bought out by a joint deal between JP Morgan and the federal government.

It’s got kind of an odd structure in that the first third of the book details the collapse of the firm, and then the rest of the book gives the entire history of the company and how they got to that point. I get that Cohan wanted to lead with the disaster part everyone was interested in, but by saving the details on the history of the major players until the history in the rest of the book, you don’t really understand who the players were or the internal politics at play while they’re all scrambling around.

It’s a well documented book that gives you a pretty good idea of how a firm once known for being fairly conservative and one of the best at risk management became the first major domino to fall in the 2008 financial collapse. It mainly seems like the leadership of the firm, particularly CEO Jimmy Cayne, became far more concerned with bridge tournaments and playing golf than running an investment bank.

One of the things that made me scratch my head the most was the story of Ralph Cioffi. Considered a dynamic salesman but with no patience or head for details, Cioffi convinced Bear’s leadership to let him launch a couple of supposedly conservative hedge funds. At first, the funds did well before 2008 while Cioffi’s monthly statements always stressed that he was predicting a lot of future issues in the sub-prime mortgage market and that the fund had less than 6% of those types of investments while he prepared to make a fortune off the coming crisis. What this guy actually did was continue to buy sub-primes until they made up 60% of the funds while telling everyone that disaster was coming to anyone holding the exact shit he was buying at the same time. WTF?

I guess that’s why I’ll never be rich. I just don’t understand high finance.

Anyhow, of the two books, I’d say that Too Big To Fail gave a better and more complete picture of what happened during the meltdown, but people interested in the subject or Wall Street shenanigans will probably find this well worth their time, too.(less)

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Jan 14, 2013 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: wall_street, nonfiction

William Cohan, a former investment banker, gives us in "House of Cards" 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 shows how quickly rumors about liquidity led to a run on the bank, and how fears that a bankruptcy of Bear Stearns could wreak fiscal havoc around the world led the Federal Reserve to approve a $30 billion credit line to help JPMorgan Chase acquire the ailing...more William Cohan, a former investment banker, gives us in "House of Cards" 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 shows how quickly rumors about liquidity led to a run on the bank, and how fears that a bankruptcy of Bear Stearns could wreak fiscal havoc around the world led the Federal Reserve to approve a $30 billion credit line to help JPMorgan Chase acquire the ailing firm for a bargain-basement price. He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place: most notably the failure of two of its hedge funds, which were stuffed full with subprime mortgages, and the shocking irresponsibility of many of its senior officers, who failed to exercise oversight over the firm’s investments or wisely diversify its revenue. And in a kind of epilogue he gives us a brief glimpse of the fall of Lehman Brothers several months later, an event regarded by many Wall Street observers as the trigger to the current financial crisis, and the Fed’s decision not to give it a bailout or to work out a Bear Sterns-like solution.

While the broader outlines of the Bear Stearns story will be familiar to readers from articles in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and a lengthy piece by Mr. Burrough in “Vanity Fair,” Mr. Cohan writes with an insider’s knowledge of the workings of Wall Street, a reporter’s investigative instincts and a natural storyteller’s narrative command, and he fleshes out the timeline of the firm’s calamitous final week with myriad new details and recent interviews with some of the firm’s principals, including its flamboyant chairman and longtime chief executive, Jimmy Cayne, who often seemed more interested in playing golf and attending bridge tournaments than in tending to his company’s business.

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 dominolike 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 subprime 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.

As many reporters have observed, Bear Stearns was known for its sharp-elbowed, opportunistic culture; even in a notoriously aggressive business, it had a distinctly scrappy, results-oriented approach. Building upon many newspaper and magazine depictions of the firm, Mr. Cohan creates vivid portraits of the personalities who came to define Bear Stearns: the brilliant, authoritarian Cy Lewis, who pushed the firm into the limelight; his successor, Ace Greenberg, who put his imprimatur on the firm by looking for “people with PSD degrees,” that is non-M.B.A.’s who were poor and smart and had a deep desire to become rich; and Jimmy Cayne, the championship bridge player and former bond salesman, who stepped down as chief executive in January 2008, after a Wall Street Journal article questioned his laissez-faire management style (depicting him not only as a fanatical bridge player but also as a pot smoker, a charge he has denied) and the firm posted its first quarterly loss ever.

Mr. Cohan writes that Mr. Cayne “had only a vague understanding” of the exotic securities that would imperil the firm’s liquidity, and that he alienated (and eventually forced out) Warren Spector, the man most familiar with these financial instruments, and that, in any case, the firm exerted little oversight over the hedge funds run by Ralph Cioffi, who had heavily loaded them with toxic investments in subprime mortgages despite assurances to the contrary to investors. Mr. Cohan also notes that Mr. Cayne left to play in a bridge tournament during the crucial period in the summer of 2007 when the firm closed its failing hedge funds, and that in the midst of the March 2008 crisis he was again out of town at a bridge tournament.

Bear Stearns, whose stock had traded as high as $170 in 2007, ended up selling itself to JPMorgan Chase for less than the value of its office building, and Mr. Cohan’s account of its death spiral not only makes for riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading, but it also stands as a chilling cautionary tale about how greed and hubris and high-risk gambling wrecked one company, and turned it into a metaphor for what the author calls “the near collapse of capitalism as we have known it.”(less)

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Jun 24, 2012 Greg Talbot rated it 4 of 5 stars

As Robert Schiller wrote in Irrational Excuberance, when you look at what Americans were reading in the 1930s, there was a critical focus on books and writings about the economy and how the run on the banks had unfolded. Starting in the beginning we see where the dust has settled and JP Morgan has bought out the remaining equity from the former premier bank Bear Sterns. What Cohen brings is the inner storm; the restless economic changes throughout Sterns run, and the ferocious battle their leade...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Cyndi rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I finished the book but in no way feel I could have an intelligent conversation regarding the crash of 2008 and the events that led up to the crash. I was hoping to understand a bit more about how the stock market works and the different funds and players in the game. I learned just that - it is a game. The author talks about the way funds are sold and players are brought in, that it is much like a pyramid scheme. I thought it was more of a shell game, shuffle here, cover that one up and guess w...more

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Dec 25, 2011 Abhishek rated it 4 of 5 stars

While the Wall Street stories emerging post the subprime crisis are plentiful, reading about them at length may not always be captivating for the common man. And that is why each book is required to do something different, tell something that the previous book did not, fill in the gaps left in other stories. House of Cards tries to tell the complete tale of the rise and fall of Bear Sterns. And William Cohan does a pretty good job of it! The best part that I liked about the style of narration is...more

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Aug 11, 2011 lindsay rated it 3 of 5 stars

Interesting behind the scenes look at the collapse of Bear Stearns. But the thing that bothered me most about this book is the sensationalist subtitle about "hubris and wretched excess" on Wall Street. Because ultimately my takeaway from this book is that Wall Street was simply playing within the rules set up by the political and regulatory regimes that created a push towards homeownership and lessening credit standards to promote some sort of ideal world where everyone owns a home (even if they...more

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Jul 20, 2011 Frank Stein rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

OK, I've definitely reached burnout on books about the financial crisis. I swear this is the last one.

This book recounts the rise and fall of Bear Stearns, once the fifth largest investment bank in America and now a mere rounding error on JP Morgan's balance sheet. It centers around Jimmy Cayne, the aggresive CEO of Bear Stearns for the 15 years preceding its collapse, and, importantly, a renowned international bridge champion who spent much of the firm's crucial days perfecting his game.

Cohan...more OK, I've definitely reached burnout on books about the financial crisis. I swear this is the last one.

This book recounts the rise and fall of Bear Stearns, once the fifth largest investment bank in America and now a mere rounding error on JP Morgan's balance sheet. It centers around Jimmy Cayne, the aggresive CEO of Bear Stearns for the 15 years preceding its collapse, and, importantly, a renowned international bridge champion who spent much of the firm's crucial days perfecting his game.

Cohan got extensive face time with Cayne and recounts his views on the debacle in great detail. The amazing thing is that most of the time Cayne seems oblivious to the fact that he was being interviewed for a book, or less charitably, was and is seriously unbalanced. He remembers people giving him standing ovations that nobody else recalls, he invents stories that apparently have no basis in fact, and he regularly calls his enemies in and outside the firm "cunts" and "fags." It's just astounding to have all this coming from a man who was not so long ago one of the most powerful men in New York. Of course Cohan recognized the gold he had in these uncensored remarks, but he balances them with extensive interviews with more stable people in the firm. Like any Woodward-style book that relies on anonymous quotes, part of the fun is trying to figure out which "senior executive" said what, when. Cohan seems to have relied heavily on Alex Schwartz, the CEO for the firms last two months, and Paul Friedman, one of the heads of the mortgage division, who, thanks to his central role in Cohan's tale, somehow rides off into the sunset as the good guy even though his underlings broke the whole bank down.

Overall, it's a fascinating look at the day by day machinations of a Wall Street bank, and helped me understand better everything from the repo market to secondary stock offerings. The main problem is that it's TOO day-to-day, and Cohan somehow manages to fill 600 pages with every email, text, or stray conversation he could get his hands on. Some editing would have helped immensely. (less)

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Jan 16, 2011 Jim rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the story of the great collapse on Wall Street of Bear Stearn, Lehman Bros., etc. It is about how they got into toxic subprime mortgages and then tried to repackage them for unsuspecting investors. While the big wigs made money and got rich, the investors often lost their money.
Additionally, there is a twist. Under the Clinton administration, there was a push to get mortgages for more people. The middle low and low income people. The administration lowered the standards for mortgages. I...more

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Jan 02, 2011 James rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: life-in-amerika

I've read at least 6 other books about the financial crisis of the last 3 years,
This is by far the worst of all.

The story starts on May 1st 1923,
and the author retells everything others have written and added a story of just about every cough, sneeze, and fart that occurred on Wall st since then.

This book clearly wasn't edited.
At 430 painfully long pages it just covers too much unimportant drivel.

About the only interesting thing he brought to attentions was the attitude of BS's exec's when t...more

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Nov 30, 2010 Nathan Willard rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: financial-disaster, business

An interesting look at the rise and fall of bear stearns and its crazy management team. Hardly essential reading, as it doesn't really get into much of the broader implications of the fall, except as it predicted the lehman collapse and reaction. But Bear was such a seriously messed-up company that it was sort of fun to read (well, listen to. I had the book on tape for our move down to North Carolina). It is indeed a tale of hubris and wretched excess, and I found myself wanting to get a copy of...more

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Jun 08, 2010 Diane Paoni rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really loved this book. William Cohan does an excellent job of explaining the blow by blow, day by final day, dynamics that brought Bear Stearns to its knees. The reader learns through this story in wonderful clarity not only what too big to fail means but also what aspects of the financial system reach a point of no good options. The story as revealed is the best argument I've seen for regulating hedge funds, investment banks, and limiting the leverage which can accrue in whatever financial i...more

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May 21, 2010 Laura Lorber rated it 4 of 5 stars

Still reading this, so here's my take so far. It literally took until about page 200 of the 450 page book to get into it. The beginning was so incredibly depressing, as it goes into extreme detail about the last two weeks of the life of the firm, particularly the painful last weekend of negotiating its sale to JPMorgan. Just about every page includes the sentence: "We're f--ked," or the equivalent. It's really hard to take -- maybe because a close family member lived through it and I closely fol...more

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Sep 22, 2009 Mazola1 rated it 4 of 5 stars

George W. Bush reportedly said of a proposed fix for the financial meltdown of 20008, "Why am I supporting a program I don't understand?" Whatever you may think of Bush's intellect and leadership, his remark is right on target in what it reveals about the complexity of the problem and the difficulty of arriving at solutions. Along with most of his fellow Americans, including many of those working on Wall Street and those supposedly regulating Wall Street, Bush found himself bewildered by the "su...more
George W. Bush reportedly said of a proposed fix for the financial meltdown of 20008, "Why am I supporting a program I don't understand?" Whatever you may think of Bush's intellect and leadership, his remark is right on target in what it reveals about the complexity of the problem and the difficulty of arriving at solutions. Along with most of his fellow Americans, including many of those working on Wall Street and those supposedly regulating Wall Street, Bush found himself bewildered by the "sudden" collapse of the financial markets in 2008.

In House of Cards, William Cohan chronicles the collapse of Bear Stearns, the event that triggered "the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008." In doing so, Cohan also chronicles the financial meltdown itself, for it is true that the big brokerage houses, banks and other financial institutions were so interconnected that the system was like a giant house of cards held together by trust. Cohan explains how Bear Stearns got started, how it grew so big, the risks it took, what went wrong, and its unavailing efforts to save itself. Quite a bit of somewhat arcane and technical material is included, but this story is one that is simply impossible to tell simply. That having been said, Cohan does a great job of making an immensely complicated subject understandable.

For a person like myself, with curiosity about how the financial markets work and what went wrong, but with absolutely no background in this area, the book was sometimes quite difficult to follow and to understand. It's one of those books where you can understand every word in many of the sentences, but their meaning still escapes you. But that has more to do with my limitations and the incredibly hard to understand subject matter than with any deficiencies in Cohan's writing. Although I started out not knowing what hedge funds, asset-backed securities, Alt-A mortgages, subprime lending, margin calls, counterparties, mark-to-market accounting rules and the repo market were, by the end of the book I was able to dimly figure these things out as well as to gain some understanding of their role in creating the "toxic Ebola" that nearly wiped out the world's financial markets.

At times House of Cards struck me as tedious and boring, but at other times it was as suspenseful as any fiction thriller. And the tale it tells is almost as hard to believe as any work of improbable fiction. Although at times the going was rough, the read was well worth the effort. (less)

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Apr 12, 2009 Kathleen Gilroy rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have read a few books about the financial crisis and this may be the best so far. William Cohan details the downfall of Bear Stearns. The books is elegantly structured: he begins with the days just prior to the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan for dollars a share (this one year after it had traded as high as $175 per share). Cohan clearly had detailed inside information and his recounting of the meetings and conversations and opinions of the key players is fascinating to follow. This section...more

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Apr 05, 2009 Evo Popoff rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

The first part of the book is a wonderful play by play of the final days of Bear Stearns in March 2008. The story of how a firm can go from solvent to out of business in 24 hours and the people who brought it down is both fascinating and frightening. The second part, which relates the rise of the firm over the last 80 years, is also interesting and juxtaposes nicely with the frenetic first part (the second part covers 80 years in the same number of pages that the first part covers a week). The l...more

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Jun 08, 2011 Owen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book will shock and anger you, as it demonstrates that Wall Street is a shell game of people borrowing money from each other to buy things from each other. Having had some education in the subject, with folks from my grad program scheming to be quants on the Street during the heyday of the real estate boom, I was always leery of money for nothing. Seemed liked smoke and mirrors destined to fail. Of course I had no idea it would fall apart like it did (almost ruining the world economy, eatin...more This book will shock and anger you, as it demonstrates that Wall Street is a shell game of people borrowing money from each other to buy things from each other. Having had some education in the subject, with folks from my grad program scheming to be quants on the Street during the heyday of the real estate boom, I was always leery of money for nothing. Seemed liked smoke and mirrors destined to fail. Of course I had no idea it would fall apart like it did (almost ruining the world economy, eating $1.5 trillion of my tax money, crippling lending, etc). I had no idea just how little the executives actually understood what was going on. I remembered various firms disintegrating, with a haphazard pattern of some being bailed out by the government and others left to fall apart. The book opens at the end, talking through the last frantic days of the venerable Bear Stearns. What is astonishing (apart from the embarrassing sports and war metaphors among the executives) is how fast it happened. One day Bear Stearns stock was worth $80/share. Four days later, they were extinct, bought in a fire sale by JPMorganChase, begging to get the price back up to $10/share from the offer of $2- and this only worked with a boatload of your tax dollars involved. Companies have failed for as long as there have been companies- but this one failed just the way the title implies. The first third of the book walks through these last few days.

The next third details the history of Bear Stearns, starting at the beginning, but concentrating on the rise of ‘Ace’ Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne. It’s interesting and moves well, and necessary. The last third walks back the reader back into the last days, then beyond, looking at the lessons that Wall Street failed to learn, and watching Lehman Brothers fall apart (and somewhat sympathetic to Dick Fuld, interestingly enough.) The lists of casual excesses indulged by the various characters is so obscene it can't be real-weekly helicopter trips to play golf and go home, all during work hours, for which they were paid absurd amounts of money. Worth the read.(less)

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May 11, 2009 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very inside view of the collapse of Bear Stearns told in a way that even a layman can understand. I really liked this book even if it felt at times that Cohan had gotten a little too close to his subjects. There is an awful lot of empathy for all the characters involved which may have been the sentiment at the time, but certainly isn't any longer. There is a very palpable sense of hopelessness that Cohan is able to capture. He is able to portray the main figures at Bear Stearns very much like...more A very inside view of the collapse of Bear Stearns told in a way that even a layman can understand. I really liked this book even if it felt at times that Cohan had gotten a little too close to his subjects. There is an awful lot of empathy for all the characters involved which may have been the sentiment at the time, but certainly isn't any longer. There is a very palpable sense of hopelessness that Cohan is able to capture. He is able to portray the main figures at Bear Stearns very much like animals caught in a trap, waiting for the inevitable outcome.

This is the book that we'll look back and read to understand what happened in March of 2008, the first real wake up call that there was real trouble ahead and just how bad it could have gotten. Also, it helps to put into context the coming failure of Lehman Brothers and why the Treasury and Fed felt they had to avoid similar meltdowns at other big banks and diversified financials.

I especially enjoyed the second part of the book where Cohan deals with the prominent figures at the firm, telling their unique histories as well as the dynamics at Bear that lead to their collapse, how their inherent character flaws and sibling rivalries at this Wall Street giant left it vulnerable to overexposure to risk and bad decisions. At the same time that Cohan outlines how they arrived to the unhealthy practices of their business model, he is able to convey to the reader how all those same participants believed wholeheartedly that nothing would ever come along that could topple their empire. These guys ran their lives like the Patriots headed into the Superbowl against the Giants, never thinking that they could possibly lose since they hadn't lost all season.

But we know how that turned out, too.

Ultimately however, what Cohan does with this book is expose that this was not a "perfect storm" that undid Bear Stearns, but rather the building up of something so fragile that any hiccup could have taken it down until eventually, one did.
(less)

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Jan 08, 2011 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, business, economics-finance

If I say that the spread on a CDS is widening, do you know what that means? Do you know what a tranche is? How about mark-to-market? If you don’t, there will be some parts of this book that you don’t understand. Otherwise, this is an excellent book covering Bear Stearns, both their failure and complete history. Having previously read Bear-Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008 I couldn’t help but to compare the two. While this lacks the drama and emotionality of being an insider ou...more

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May 20, 2009 Gail rated it 3 of 5 stars

I thought this was an interesting, readable book about the culture at Bear Stearns. It gives a history of the company, as well as a description of the collapse. I never realized BS was on the verge of a crisis so many times in its past.

Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne are described in detail. Sometimes they are good businessmen, often obnoxious (especially Cayne), and always bigger than life characters with some hugh egos.

The CEO's were often off playing competitive bridge when they should have b...more

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Mar 24, 2009 Katy rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns. I read it because I thought it would be interesting to be behind the scenes in the Wall Street melt-down, and perhaps help me understand a little better just what happened to the economy. I have no business bckground, though, and was a little leary that it might be way over my head.

The author did a great job, in the first section, of giving a development-by-development accounting of the last ten days of Bear Stearns. Some of the information was tech...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Neal rated it 4 of 5 stars

The collapse of one of the largest financial firms on Wall Street, Bear Stearns, precipitated the tumultuous economic downturn that has shaken up the world economy. William Cohan, a former investment banker, reconstructs the last week of Bear Stearns in thrilling detail through interviews with Bear Stearns bankers, Federal Reserve officers and other financial players.

Cohan devotes a considerable portion of the book to a 75-year history of Bear Stearns through profiles of three larger-than-life m...more

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Apr 29, 2009 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction-other

Fascinating, horrifying, disgusting...an amazing glimpse inside the workings of Bear Stearns, its founders, its management, and the culture of the company that made it vulnerable to the series of things that ultimately caused its demise.

If this culture is typical, we have a lot of changing we must do on Wall Street. If, as I hope, these dysfunctional characters and their dysfunctional companies are not typical, then there is hope for a return to operating from a more solid foundation and not in...more

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Mar 11, 2010 Pat rated it 3 of 5 stars

The story of the rise and fall of Bear Stearns both during the final wretched weeks, which is where the book begins, and in macro, as the last 2/3 of the book recites the history of the institution from it's founding. You see detailed events unfold. You see how the personalities and the egos of the major players lead to catastrophic mistakes,clashes and outright neglect. What people like me, with very limited knowledge of the financial sector and how it operates,do not learn is much about how th...more

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Mar 29, 2010 Corinne rated it 2 of 5 stars

I knew nothing about how the financial collapse happened--at least not in detail of how the subprime mortgage securities were structured, and ultimately, how Bear Stearns and Lehman failed. I figured it had to be more than people taking out mortgages on houses they couldn't afford since the losses were so much greater than the value of the loans.

So I picked this up. The first 150 pages on the fall of Bear I found really interesting, if for no other reason than the author clearly has top level co...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

An excellent first book to read on the financial crisis, Cohan works through the major issues that led to the events of 2008-2009. Because he began writing it before the most significant events took place, there is an almost innocent quality to the writing, as if the federally-engineered rescue was the most important event. From today’s perspective it was merely a prologue.
The greatest benefit of this book is to explore in-depth a single event of the financial crisis. Most other books on the t...more

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Apr 27, 2009 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: business-books

In spite of having a business degree, I found the discussions of the liquidity crisis heavy going. The summary comments in which Alan Schwartz blames much of his firm's trouble on the cycle rise of commodity prices and the boom in debt instrument pricing in the face of a rise in infrastructure investment left me fairly mystified.

The redeeming featuring was that inside taste of life in investment banking, alternating from crass vulgarity to high flown financial statesmanship.

I was particularly d...more

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Aug 14, 2010 asteroidbuckle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, business

This book was riveting, despite the fact that much of the lingo went right over my head. Written like a novel and crammed full of interesting real-life characters, I found this book utterly fascinating. Cohan has a knack for bringing what could've easily been a very dry subject to life.

When the American housing boom ended abruptly, the good times enjoyed by many of the Wall Street giants ended. One of these giants was Bear Stearns, a smallish investment bank (among other things) that had a good,...more

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Aug 18, 2009 getAbstract rated it 5 of 5 stars

Inside saga of Bear Stearns’s dazzling rise and dramatic, abrupt decline

The 2008 collapse of leading Wall Street investment house Bear Stearns showed the world just how rickety the global financial system had become. William D. Cohan tracks the firm’s dizzying rise and rapid collapse. His access to Bear Stearns insiders is the book’s strongest point. He offers a trenchant analysis of its decades-long rise and a definitive account of its final days. Cohan paints textured portraits of Bear’s top p...more

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Aug 06, 2009 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

I didn't expect much from this book, and was pleasantly surprised. Well written and surprisingly compelling, Cohan focuses us on personality and people, but manages to sneak in lots of technical discussions of trades and banking relationships that are critical to the story. I'd actually recommend this book to most people in finance or banking, and anyone who wants to know more even after watching, say, Frontline's specials on the credit crisis (see "Inside the Meltdown, 10 trillion and counting,...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterpr...more On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.

How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making 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, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke 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.

The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).

Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.

Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.(less)

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