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House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
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.
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.
468 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2009
About the author
William D. Cohan
9 books168 followersWilliam 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 published The 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 book House 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.
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 published The 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 book House 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 275 reviews
October 6, 2011
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.
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.
January 3, 2011
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 they found out the stock would only fetch $2.
Most figured screw the world, let the company go bankrupt
and if it takes America down, fuck em.
How did we let these morons take the position of wealth and power that they have?
Wall st. sucks more out of the rest of America with each passing decade,
and does nothing worthwhile for it.
We need to cut those crooks off at the knees before they destroy our financial system.
And we need better writers to tell the story.
JPMorgan bought BS, people thought it was a great deal for them.
Was it?
The author doesn't follow the story to that point.
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 they found out the stock would only fetch $2.
Most figured screw the world, let the company go bankrupt
and if it takes America down, fuck em.
How did we let these morons take the position of wealth and power that they have?
Wall st. sucks more out of the rest of America with each passing decade,
and does nothing worthwhile for it.
We need to cut those crooks off at the knees before they destroy our financial system.
And we need better writers to tell the story.
JPMorgan bought BS, people thought it was a great deal for them.
Was it?
The author doesn't follow the story to that point.
March 17, 2010
Goodreads needs a new Bookshelf Tag....Abandoned! I struggled through half of this book for a week and a half and just couldn't do it anymore. The first few pages are fascinating. We get a behind the scenes look at the negotiations behind the collaspe and rescue of Bear Sterns. It is unbelievable how these companies operate, selling and borrowing on securities leveraged out the ying-yang. It was also exciting...before most of us have hit the alarm, billions of dollars have already been traded.
But, the detail in the book is excruciating. I felt like the author kept saying the same thing over and over and over. I just couldn't devote any more time to it.
But, the detail in the book is excruciating. I felt like the author kept saying the same thing over and over and over. I just couldn't devote any more time to it.
July 15, 2009
The book appears to have been raced out, and is somewhat disorganized, covering much of the material twice. It isn't a compelling read, but if you are interested in the subject matter specifically of the fall of Bear Stearns, it covers it pretty thoroughly. But it just deals with the fall of Bear Stearns, not any of the other troubles on Wall Street, so if you are looking for an overview of the street in this century (and the debacle of our current economy), this is not your book.
December 25, 2011
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 that it starts off by explaining the last 10 days at Bear Sterns (remember the entity vanished in March 2008 after its sale to JP Morgan) and then rides back in time to talk about the three great Wall Street personalities who contributed immensely over an 85 year history to make this company the fifth biggest Investment Bank (and contributed as well to its eventual demise). The first part of the book is brilliant as the story moves at a solid pace keeping the readers on the edge of their seats as operations of each successive day becomes a question mark at Bear Sterns during its final days of existence. The second part describes the hard boxer-like culture of Bear Sterns, created over the years by the presence of personalities like Cy Lewis, Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne at the helm of things. It is only in the final one-fifth of the book that the story starts to lose its appeal when it narrates too much about how the subprime mortagages and the eventual CDOs and CDSs came into being, which remains no longer a mystery, having been told and read by one and all. Barring for that portion of the book, the rest of the story is a must read for people interested in such financial stories... for there would hardly be anything more interesting than the tale of greatness and woe seen at Bear Sterns... RIP!
June 17, 2023
"House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" is a gripping and eye-opening account that exposes the dark underbelly of the financial world. In this meticulously researched book, the author provides a shocking narrative of the excessive greed, corruption, and unethical practices that led to the collapse of major financial institutions during the 2008 global financial crisis. The author's storytelling prowess combined with a deep understanding of the intricate mechanisms of Wall Street creates a compelling and informative read. This book serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of unchecked ambition and serves as a cautionary tale for both industry insiders and the general public.
January 15, 2013
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.”
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.”
May 11, 2021
My fascination with the 2008 financial crisis is probably leaning towards the unhealthy side of the scale, but I'm okay with that. I will continue to read books and watch movies about it, and continue to be shocked at how it all happened and the dumb decisions so many people made that allowed it to happen. The final few sentences of this book actually sum up the whole thing pretty well...
Rather than discuss the financial crisis in its entirety, this book only focuses on the rise and fall of the firm Bear Stearns. Part 1 [Chapters 1-12] is about March 2008, where Bear Stearns experienced its final 10 days. Part 2 [Chapters 13-20] is about the first 85 years of Bear Stearns. Part 3 [Chapters 23-31] starts with September 11, 2001 and discusses Bear Stearns through to March 2008. The epilogue is the only part of the book that shifts the focus away from Bear Stearns and discusses some other firms, mostly the collapse and bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers.
This book was a pretty good read. I flew through Parts 1 and 3 (and the epilogue) but found it rather difficult to get through Part 2, maybe because I just didn't care about how Bear Stearns came to be... things really didn't start happening (with respect to how they led up to collapsing) until the 2000s anyways.
Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, the managers of the two hedge funds at Bear Stearns that lost nearly all their value (and triggered the firms collapse), were arrested but found not guilty of misleading investors. I'm really not sure how this was possible. Frequently, Cioffi would realize the fund was doing one thing but would inform investors it was doing "x" instead. He lied to investors for a while thinking that it would be okay because the fund would eventually go back up. Guy was a prick.
I would have preferred if the book went in chronological order, instead of starting with the final 10 days of the firm, but I can understand why it started that way, gotta hook the readers in somehow.
But these things happen and they're big, and when they happen everybody tries to look at what happened in the previous six months to find someone or something to blame it on. But, in truth, it was a team effort. We all fucked up. Government. Rating agencies. Wall Street. Commercial banks. Regulators. Investors. Everybody.Ain't that the truth.
Rather than discuss the financial crisis in its entirety, this book only focuses on the rise and fall of the firm Bear Stearns. Part 1 [Chapters 1-12] is about March 2008, where Bear Stearns experienced its final 10 days. Part 2 [Chapters 13-20] is about the first 85 years of Bear Stearns. Part 3 [Chapters 23-31] starts with September 11, 2001 and discusses Bear Stearns through to March 2008. The epilogue is the only part of the book that shifts the focus away from Bear Stearns and discusses some other firms, mostly the collapse and bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers.
This book was a pretty good read. I flew through Parts 1 and 3 (and the epilogue) but found it rather difficult to get through Part 2, maybe because I just didn't care about how Bear Stearns came to be... things really didn't start happening (with respect to how they led up to collapsing) until the 2000s anyways.
Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, the managers of the two hedge funds at Bear Stearns that lost nearly all their value (and triggered the firms collapse), were arrested but found not guilty of misleading investors. I'm really not sure how this was possible. Frequently, Cioffi would realize the fund was doing one thing but would inform investors it was doing "x" instead. He lied to investors for a while thinking that it would be okay because the fund would eventually go back up. Guy was a prick.
I would have preferred if the book went in chronological order, instead of starting with the final 10 days of the firm, but I can understand why it started that way, gotta hook the readers in somehow.
August 4, 2018
This is a much more illuminating view of the financial crisis than books by regulators such as On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Hank Paulson or Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Tim Geithner. The last two books gave an intense overview of the situation while “House of Cards” felt like a view from the ground floor of Wall Street.
September 19, 2016
Not the House of Cards I thought I was checking out from the library, but somehow still relevant to my interests! Non-fiction drama about the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers at the beginning of the global financial crisis of 2008 precipitated by the repeal of Dodd-Franklin and the genesis of adjustable rate/no money down mortgages rife with fraud on the part of the bankers writing the loans, then packaged into CDOs rated as AAA, though most were not filled with only AAA tranches.
Anyway. People lie when they have an incentive and no oversight. This is the moral of the story here. Also, read your damn mortgage before you sign it!
Anyway. People lie when they have an incentive and no oversight. This is the moral of the story here. Also, read your damn mortgage before you sign it!
January 31, 2017
Three stars just because it was w-a-a-a-a-y over my head, but I understood enough of it to be horrified.
September 10, 2013
BEARING ALL?
William D. Cohan, a journalist for the Financial Times and Fortune magazine and formerly an "investment" banker on Wall Street, has written an account of the financial company Bear Sterns from its inception to its demise during the initial stages of the recent financial crisis.
Cohans starts of his tale at the end with an account of the goings on as Bear Sterns attempted to stave of liquidation before going on to tell the story of it's inception and life, finally ending on where it began with the companies demise, as well as an ostensibly broader picture of the credit crunch kicking in.
Unfortunately Cohan is unable to transcend his background as an insider and financial journalist and makes little effort, not even a glossary, to describe the terms that he throws around the text with gay abandon, for those without a background in finance, or a working knowledge of the large lexicon of financial terminology. The impression is of someone who, in a manner of speaking, is in love (with perhaps a dash of hate) with the world of high finance (quite literally for the apparently dope smoking Bear Sterns CEO James Cayne) and has written a book primarily for insiders. The compensation package for the financially illiterate is a stirring narrative, of rich, hard working, foul mouthed and folksy bankers, studded with quotation after quotation from many of the main characters in the tragedy, or more likely farce, that makes up Bear Sterns life and death.
With regard to broader issues beyond the internal world of Bear Sterns and Wall Street Cohan is silent, or fairly asinine. The perspective is one that seems unable to step outside the collection of received wisdoms that make up the free-market mantras of Wall Street. Personally if I heard another CEO of a belly up banking company mouth platitudes about the fate of his employees, given the fate of the average American employee under Wall Streets regime, I was going to puke up.
A compelling enough read, but like many of the main personalities of the story, one that is essentially hollow and un-enlightening with the exception of what one can garner by reading between the lines. Personally I'll be looking elsewhere for the story of the credit crunch.
William D. Cohan, a journalist for the Financial Times and Fortune magazine and formerly an "investment" banker on Wall Street, has written an account of the financial company Bear Sterns from its inception to its demise during the initial stages of the recent financial crisis.
Cohans starts of his tale at the end with an account of the goings on as Bear Sterns attempted to stave of liquidation before going on to tell the story of it's inception and life, finally ending on where it began with the companies demise, as well as an ostensibly broader picture of the credit crunch kicking in.
Unfortunately Cohan is unable to transcend his background as an insider and financial journalist and makes little effort, not even a glossary, to describe the terms that he throws around the text with gay abandon, for those without a background in finance, or a working knowledge of the large lexicon of financial terminology. The impression is of someone who, in a manner of speaking, is in love (with perhaps a dash of hate) with the world of high finance (quite literally for the apparently dope smoking Bear Sterns CEO James Cayne) and has written a book primarily for insiders. The compensation package for the financially illiterate is a stirring narrative, of rich, hard working, foul mouthed and folksy bankers, studded with quotation after quotation from many of the main characters in the tragedy, or more likely farce, that makes up Bear Sterns life and death.
With regard to broader issues beyond the internal world of Bear Sterns and Wall Street Cohan is silent, or fairly asinine. The perspective is one that seems unable to step outside the collection of received wisdoms that make up the free-market mantras of Wall Street. Personally if I heard another CEO of a belly up banking company mouth platitudes about the fate of his employees, given the fate of the average American employee under Wall Streets regime, I was going to puke up.
A compelling enough read, but like many of the main personalities of the story, one that is essentially hollow and un-enlightening with the exception of what one can garner by reading between the lines. Personally I'll be looking elsewhere for the story of the credit crunch.
June 24, 2012
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 leaders fought through. Then Cohen dives into the 80 year history of it’s leadership. Showcasing the brilliant smoothness of Greenwald, and his role in expanding Bears reach as a major playor into the 1980s, and is somewhat acrimonious with the dogged Cayne. Their gamesmanship, penchant for bridge and risk and personal foibles are all on display here.
What I took away from this book is that instability rocked Wall Street in the mid 00’s in a way that no one really predicted (even if Goldman Sachs put shorts against the CDOs they were selling to profit from the bear market). This unprecedented housing bubble and unmitigated failure to put safeguards is largely responsible for the crisis we are in today. I can’t claim to fully understand all the financial terminology, but I took away a strong sense of the stakes that the firm encountered. The book ends with a pessimism of King Lear proportion, with Schwartz, one of Sterns leaders, forecasting the abyss the world finds itself racked into.
What I took away from this book is that instability rocked Wall Street in the mid 00’s in a way that no one really predicted (even if Goldman Sachs put shorts against the CDOs they were selling to profit from the bear market). This unprecedented housing bubble and unmitigated failure to put safeguards is largely responsible for the crisis we are in today. I can’t claim to fully understand all the financial terminology, but I took away a strong sense of the stakes that the firm encountered. The book ends with a pessimism of King Lear proportion, with Schwartz, one of Sterns leaders, forecasting the abyss the world finds itself racked into.
April 18, 2023
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 connections, and the quotes from the Bear execs are jaw dropping. The rest is okay--what I found annoying however, is that he never explains how any of the securities are structured, so the terminology required me to do a lot of googling. I'm looking forward to reading the new Michael Lewis book for a different perspective....
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 connections, and the quotes from the Bear execs are jaw dropping. The rest is okay--what I found annoying however, is that he never explains how any of the securities are structured, so the terminology required me to do a lot of googling. I'm looking forward to reading the new Michael Lewis book for a different perspective....
March 26, 2021
Focused on details of bailout
This book was very focused on the minutia of the last days of Bear Sterns and the behavior of their eccentric CEO to the detriment of explaining the business practices that got them into so much trouble. It was like looking at the fall of Rome in terms of the final barbarian sack of the city, instead of a good explanation of how they got into that fix. It history and biographical details of the movers and shakers of Bear Sterns was interesting. I had no idea that bridge was so important in the financial world. I had always heard it was golf. But I think Jimmy Cayne’s antics weren’t the root cause of the collapse.
This book was very focused on the minutia of the last days of Bear Sterns and the behavior of their eccentric CEO to the detriment of explaining the business practices that got them into so much trouble. It was like looking at the fall of Rome in terms of the final barbarian sack of the city, instead of a good explanation of how they got into that fix. It history and biographical details of the movers and shakers of Bear Sterns was interesting. I had no idea that bridge was so important in the financial world. I had always heard it was golf. But I think Jimmy Cayne’s antics weren’t the root cause of the collapse.
July 1, 2009
If you took out the verbatim email reprints, verbatim half-page chunks from articles in CEO Magazine, and verbatim rambling quotations, this would be about 20 pages long. And the parts that Cohan himself actually wrote are kind of unfortunate: on the second page of this book about mortgage-induced financial collapse, he confuses one kind of mortgage for another. It's like a term paper in a class the author's taking pass/fail.
June 14, 2012
A great and remarkably detailed account of the history and demise of Bear Sterns. Makes you wish other books about the Wall Street debacle would take the time to explain it step by step like this book does.
July 20, 2021
I need to go through this book again to really grasp what happened. Going in I knew next to nothing about what happened and now I know a general overview. The book lost me a few times but was still interesting.
May 7, 2018
Interesting story of the fall of Bear Stearns.
May 16, 2020
my first book about the debacle of 2008
Read
November 12, 2016"[A] definitve account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era....recounts these events capably.....[and explains] Goldman's cultivation of a reputation for brilliance unique even in the rarefied precincts of Wall Street.....gives readers the information they need to ponder whether investment banking has moved in a constructive direction."--The New York Times Book Review
""Destined to be a runaway bestseller...There's no shortage of Goldman clients, rivals, and former employees willing to explain how greed and recklessness led Goldman to become too big, too powerful, and even too conflicted to fail. As one Goldman alum puts it, 'I saw what they did to their customers...They'd steal from them, rape them, anything they could do.' It worked like a charm...[Cohan] has produced the frankest, most detailed, most human assessment of the bank to date. Cohan portrays a firm that has grown so large and hungry that it's no longer long-term greedy but short-term vicious. And that's the wonder -- and horror -- of Goldman Sachs."
-- Businessweek
"A well-researched history and analysis of the world’s most powerful investment bank. Written with the co-operation of the top people at Goldman, Cohan’s book is neither a hatchet-job nor a whitewash – and all the better for that."--The Financial Times
"[Money and Power] offers the best analysis yet of Goldman's increasingly tangled web of conflicts...The writing is crisp and the research meticulous, drawing on reams of documents made publicly available by congressional committees and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission."
-- The Economist
"[E]xhaustive, revelatory account of the rise and rise of Goldman Sachs....engrossing....penetrating....Cohan revels in a good bust-up and lingers over anecdotes involving intrigue....All the senior partners still living spoke to him, often very candidly, and only a few from the next ranks seem to have refuse....a vast trove of material"
--The Financial Times
"A former Lazard Freres & Co. banker and newspaper reporter, Cohan brings the bank's sometimes 'schizophrenic' behavior to vivid life...Drawing on more than 100 interviews with clients, competitors and Goldman leaders including Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, Cohan evinces an eye for telling images and an ear for deadpan quotations."
-- Bloomberg
"In MONEY & POWER, journalist and former investment banker William D. Cohan launches a quixotic quest to show that Mr. Blankfein and his peers are money-sucking evil-doers that came to their riches mostly by nefarious means...(full disclosure: I was once a Goldman Sachs employee myself)....Mr. Cohan's complaints against Goldman seem to be that it is 'ruthless' in pursuit of profit; doesn't do enough to protect its instutitional clients from making bad decisions; works too closely with government; too often advises clients on both sides of a deal; and skirts close to the line of 'insider trading'."
-- Mary Kissel, The Wall Street Journal
Praise for HOUSE OF CARDS
"Like Michael Lewis’s ‘Liar’s Poker’ and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate,’ this volume turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping .... [His] 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."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Fascinating.”--The Wall Street Journal
"A riveting blow-by-blow account." --The Economist
"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... It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." --Los Angeles Times
Praise for THE LAST TYCOONS
“Cohan’s portrayal of the firm's dominant partners—whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book’s operatic melodramas— makes this an epic . . . In fact, The Last Tycoons bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon.”—New York Times Book Review
“Breezy and highly readable . . . For those of us who enjoy high-level gossip (most people) and an inside look at the machinations, triumphs, failures, and foibles of some of Wall Street’s and America’s most exalted personages, Cohan’s book is entertaining and seductively engrossing.”—Chicago Tribune
“Cohan not only knows where the bodies are buried but got a guided tour of the graveyard.”—Financial Times
“Rips the roof off of one of Wall Street’s most storied investment banks.”—Vanity Fair
Read more
About the Author
William D. Cohan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons, which won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has a bi-weekly opinion column in The New York Times, and writes frequently for The Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post, among other publications. A former investment banker, Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
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Read an excerpt from Money and Power. [PDF]
Product Details
Hardcover: 672 pages
Publisher: Doubleday (April 12, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 038552384X
ISBN-13: 978-0385523844
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #523,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#566 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Banks & Banking
#1198 in Books > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Profiles
#2771 in Books > Business & Money > Finance
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Biography
WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times bestselling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His 2014 book, The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was also a New York Times bestseller. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes a bi-weekly opinion column for the Dealbook section of the New York Times. He also writes for Fortune, The Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, ArtNews, the Irish Times, and the Washington Post. He also appears regularly on MSNBC, on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, and on CNN and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared as a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs. He is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business
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5.0 out of 5 starsInside scoop on the "giant vampire squid"
By Srikumar S. Rao VINE VOICE on April 17, 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
In his now famous - infamous? - Rolling Stone article Matt Taibbi refers to Goldman Sachs as a "...great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money." Cohan,whose earlier books gave you the inside scoop on Lazard Freres and Bear Stearns now turns his searchlight on Goldman Sachs, arguably one of the most powerful financial institutions that ever existed.
It is not really a Goldman "bashing" book but there is plenty of hard reporting that lead one to wonder how Goldman can get away with proclaiming itself to be a temple of team play and a firm where customer interests always come first. Team playing culture? Cohan gives you details about the unusually sharp knives that came out frequently in succession struggles from earlier days - Gus Levy clashing with Sid Weinberg - to more recent events - Hank Paulson ousting Jon Corzine - and paint a picture quite at variance with Goldman PR.
Customer comes first? Cohan reveals that way back in the sixties Goldman was sued for "...fraud, deception, concealment, suppression and false pretense..." in connection with the Penn Central fiasco. Creditors claimed that Goldman "...made promises and representations as to the future (of the company) which were beyond reasonable expectations and unwarranted by existing circumstances." You make up your mind about whether this was a disgruntled customer trying to splash mud or a depiction of Goldman's approach. It certainly was a harbinger of later developments such as the firms disingenuous statement that it was not "betting against its customers" during the sub-prime crisis but merely and prudently managing its risk profile. If you believe that may I interest you in a solid gold brick I found on Fifth Avenue the other day?Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsWow, what a book - EXTRAORDINARY - No Holds Barred - 5 STARS !!!!
By Richard of Connecticut on April 19, 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Every now and then, someone comes along and writes a book, and in the process lays out a new framework of understanding with such exquisite detail that the average reader's generalized understanding of how the world works is blown away, and a new understanding becomes the norm. This is EXACTLY what author William Cohan has achieved with "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World."
Such a book was Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy and Hope". Quigley understood how the world worked and the dark forces that can exert undue enormous power behind the scenes. President Clinton in his inauguration speech specifically mentioned the power that Carroll Quigley had over him when he was student at Georgetown and Quigley lectured about those who truly control the world. Clinton understood the power structure, and their assumed ruthlessness, and was forever changed by it. Now we have in Cohan's book the thorough exposure of the less seemly side of Goldman Sachs.
Today there are only two firms that have the cache value to make an MBA's dream of working for them. They are Goldman Sach's in the financial world and McKinsey & Company in management consulting. If you work for either entity, it is the equivalent of having a halo over your head. You are anointed. Goldman Sachs now stands alone as the ultimate financial wheeler dealer in our time. With 35,000 employees, they still manage to be able to cut and slash like an institution a tenth of their current size.
Being a former alumnus of both Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, and currently managing several billions of dollars of private money, I have always had the utmost respect for Goldman. I believed then as now that only Goldman could possibly have been better run than either Bear or Lehman.Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsInteresting read but a bit too long
By Robert on August 1, 2011
Format: Hardcover
I have read a variety of books recently about the current financial crisis, the Great Depression, and other crises of late 19th century and 20th century. This is a reasonable addition to that list. The details on the founding of GS, it's impacts over the years on important historical events: Penn Central, LTCM, Bear Sterns, Lehman, AIG, are all very interesting and enlightening. I was quite surprised to learn many of these details.
I also appreciated the author's relatively objective tone. I came into this book with no particularly strong opinion about whether GS is evil or not and this book didn't really change my mind. However, this book does paint a strong picture of an organization with a lot of conflicts of interest. Given that most of their clients are generally other sophisticated organizations: other financial institutions, large corporations, etc, I find myself surprised that these clients continue to do business with them.
The stories about the various players of the years from Marcus Goldman through Waddill Catching and Sydney Weinberg up to the present day players in Jon Corzine, Henry Paulson, and Lloyd Blankfein are all interesting, to a point. I found many of these mini autobiographies to be way too long & tedious. This book is 600 pages long and I think could have been a much better book at maybe 400 or 450 pages.
That said, if you tackle this book, the payoffs come later. Skim some of biographies and you'll be rewarded with interesting details about GS's involvement the Penn Central crisis, the LTCM crisis, and how GS had concluded that a mortgage meltdown was coming way ahead of a lot of other players and took actions to both protect themselves and profit from it.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsand enjoyed reading the history of the firm
I worked at Goldman Sachs just after finishing my MBA, and enjoyed reading the history of the firm. Cohen has a writing style that is very detailed, but enjoyable to read.
Published 2 months ago by Deana
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Was a gift for my husband and he enjoyed it
Published 4 months ago by LMF
5.0 out of 5 starsInformative book
Great inside information re: Goldman Sachs
Published 6 months ago by adrian j fogata
4.0 out of 5 starsGood book
Interesting read and opens eyes about real workings of Wall Street . Good reference to major Wall Street major events.
Published 7 months ago by Tom D.
4.0 out of 5 starsWorth the Investment
An interesting perspective on Goldman’s rise and the issues it’s faced over the years. The focus is distinctly on the problems and not “how GS came to rule the world”. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Floccinaucinihilipilification
4.0 out of 5 starsThis book tells the story of Golman Sachs in terms ...
This book tells the story of Golman Sachs in terms of the top of the Corporation. I have never been told about a corporation before that was almost totally characterized by the top... Read more
Published 9 months ago by M.W.Heishman
3.0 out of 5 starsPaid by the word??
Very informative but twice as long as necessary to tell the story. Too repetitive. What happened to editors?
Published 10 months ago by Two Wheels
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Powerful story
Published 12 months ago by thomas
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Clearly informative. What a treat in the written word.
Published 13 months ago by Pearl A Grau
5.0 out of 5 starsGoldman Sachs
Fantastic book! It shows in details history of the Goldman Sachs, it's culture, it's principles. It is also very well written book, and very easy to read.
Published 13 months ago by Milan Remikovic
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""Destined to be a runaway bestseller...There's no shortage of Goldman clients, rivals, and former employees willing to explain how greed and recklessness led Goldman to become too big, too powerful, and even too conflicted to fail. As one Goldman alum puts it, 'I saw what they did to their customers...They'd steal from them, rape them, anything they could do.' It worked like a charm...[Cohan] has produced the frankest, most detailed, most human assessment of the bank to date. Cohan portrays a firm that has grown so large and hungry that it's no longer long-term greedy but short-term vicious. And that's the wonder -- and horror -- of Goldman Sachs."
-- Businessweek
"A well-researched history and analysis of the world’s most powerful investment bank. Written with the co-operation of the top people at Goldman, Cohan’s book is neither a hatchet-job nor a whitewash – and all the better for that."--The Financial Times
"[Money and Power] offers the best analysis yet of Goldman's increasingly tangled web of conflicts...The writing is crisp and the research meticulous, drawing on reams of documents made publicly available by congressional committees and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission."
-- The Economist
"[E]xhaustive, revelatory account of the rise and rise of Goldman Sachs....engrossing....penetrating....Cohan revels in a good bust-up and lingers over anecdotes involving intrigue....All the senior partners still living spoke to him, often very candidly, and only a few from the next ranks seem to have refuse....a vast trove of material"
--The Financial Times
"A former Lazard Freres & Co. banker and newspaper reporter, Cohan brings the bank's sometimes 'schizophrenic' behavior to vivid life...Drawing on more than 100 interviews with clients, competitors and Goldman leaders including Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, Cohan evinces an eye for telling images and an ear for deadpan quotations."
-- Bloomberg
"In MONEY & POWER, journalist and former investment banker William D. Cohan launches a quixotic quest to show that Mr. Blankfein and his peers are money-sucking evil-doers that came to their riches mostly by nefarious means...(full disclosure: I was once a Goldman Sachs employee myself)....Mr. Cohan's complaints against Goldman seem to be that it is 'ruthless' in pursuit of profit; doesn't do enough to protect its instutitional clients from making bad decisions; works too closely with government; too often advises clients on both sides of a deal; and skirts close to the line of 'insider trading'."
-- Mary Kissel, The Wall Street Journal
Praise for HOUSE OF CARDS
"Like Michael Lewis’s ‘Liar’s Poker’ and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate,’ this volume turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping .... [His] 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."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Fascinating.”--The Wall Street Journal
"A riveting blow-by-blow account." --The Economist
"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... It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." --Los Angeles Times
Praise for THE LAST TYCOONS
“Cohan’s portrayal of the firm's dominant partners—whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book’s operatic melodramas— makes this an epic . . . In fact, The Last Tycoons bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon.”—New York Times Book Review
“Breezy and highly readable . . . For those of us who enjoy high-level gossip (most people) and an inside look at the machinations, triumphs, failures, and foibles of some of Wall Street’s and America’s most exalted personages, Cohan’s book is entertaining and seductively engrossing.”—Chicago Tribune
“Cohan not only knows where the bodies are buried but got a guided tour of the graveyard.”—Financial Times
“Rips the roof off of one of Wall Street’s most storied investment banks.”—Vanity Fair
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About the Author
William D. Cohan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons, which won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has a bi-weekly opinion column in The New York Times, and writes frequently for The Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post, among other publications. A former investment banker, Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
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Product Details
Hardcover: 672 pages
Publisher: Doubleday (April 12, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 038552384X
ISBN-13: 978-0385523844
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #523,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#566 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Banks & Banking
#1198 in Books > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Profiles
#2771 in Books > Business & Money > Finance
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Biography
WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times bestselling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His 2014 book, The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was also a New York Times bestseller. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes a bi-weekly opinion column for the Dealbook section of the New York Times. He also writes for Fortune, The Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, ArtNews, the Irish Times, and the Washington Post. He also appears regularly on MSNBC, on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, and on CNN and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared as a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs. He is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business
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5.0 out of 5 starsInside scoop on the "giant vampire squid"
By Srikumar S. Rao VINE VOICE on April 17, 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
In his now famous - infamous? - Rolling Stone article Matt Taibbi refers to Goldman Sachs as a "...great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money." Cohan,whose earlier books gave you the inside scoop on Lazard Freres and Bear Stearns now turns his searchlight on Goldman Sachs, arguably one of the most powerful financial institutions that ever existed.
It is not really a Goldman "bashing" book but there is plenty of hard reporting that lead one to wonder how Goldman can get away with proclaiming itself to be a temple of team play and a firm where customer interests always come first. Team playing culture? Cohan gives you details about the unusually sharp knives that came out frequently in succession struggles from earlier days - Gus Levy clashing with Sid Weinberg - to more recent events - Hank Paulson ousting Jon Corzine - and paint a picture quite at variance with Goldman PR.
Customer comes first? Cohan reveals that way back in the sixties Goldman was sued for "...fraud, deception, concealment, suppression and false pretense..." in connection with the Penn Central fiasco. Creditors claimed that Goldman "...made promises and representations as to the future (of the company) which were beyond reasonable expectations and unwarranted by existing circumstances." You make up your mind about whether this was a disgruntled customer trying to splash mud or a depiction of Goldman's approach. It certainly was a harbinger of later developments such as the firms disingenuous statement that it was not "betting against its customers" during the sub-prime crisis but merely and prudently managing its risk profile. If you believe that may I interest you in a solid gold brick I found on Fifth Avenue the other day?Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsWow, what a book - EXTRAORDINARY - No Holds Barred - 5 STARS !!!!
By Richard of Connecticut on April 19, 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Every now and then, someone comes along and writes a book, and in the process lays out a new framework of understanding with such exquisite detail that the average reader's generalized understanding of how the world works is blown away, and a new understanding becomes the norm. This is EXACTLY what author William Cohan has achieved with "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World."
Such a book was Carroll Quigley's "Tragedy and Hope". Quigley understood how the world worked and the dark forces that can exert undue enormous power behind the scenes. President Clinton in his inauguration speech specifically mentioned the power that Carroll Quigley had over him when he was student at Georgetown and Quigley lectured about those who truly control the world. Clinton understood the power structure, and their assumed ruthlessness, and was forever changed by it. Now we have in Cohan's book the thorough exposure of the less seemly side of Goldman Sachs.
Today there are only two firms that have the cache value to make an MBA's dream of working for them. They are Goldman Sach's in the financial world and McKinsey & Company in management consulting. If you work for either entity, it is the equivalent of having a halo over your head. You are anointed. Goldman Sachs now stands alone as the ultimate financial wheeler dealer in our time. With 35,000 employees, they still manage to be able to cut and slash like an institution a tenth of their current size.
Being a former alumnus of both Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, and currently managing several billions of dollars of private money, I have always had the utmost respect for Goldman. I believed then as now that only Goldman could possibly have been better run than either Bear or Lehman.Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsInteresting read but a bit too long
By Robert on August 1, 2011
Format: Hardcover
I have read a variety of books recently about the current financial crisis, the Great Depression, and other crises of late 19th century and 20th century. This is a reasonable addition to that list. The details on the founding of GS, it's impacts over the years on important historical events: Penn Central, LTCM, Bear Sterns, Lehman, AIG, are all very interesting and enlightening. I was quite surprised to learn many of these details.
I also appreciated the author's relatively objective tone. I came into this book with no particularly strong opinion about whether GS is evil or not and this book didn't really change my mind. However, this book does paint a strong picture of an organization with a lot of conflicts of interest. Given that most of their clients are generally other sophisticated organizations: other financial institutions, large corporations, etc, I find myself surprised that these clients continue to do business with them.
The stories about the various players of the years from Marcus Goldman through Waddill Catching and Sydney Weinberg up to the present day players in Jon Corzine, Henry Paulson, and Lloyd Blankfein are all interesting, to a point. I found many of these mini autobiographies to be way too long & tedious. This book is 600 pages long and I think could have been a much better book at maybe 400 or 450 pages.
That said, if you tackle this book, the payoffs come later. Skim some of biographies and you'll be rewarded with interesting details about GS's involvement the Penn Central crisis, the LTCM crisis, and how GS had concluded that a mortgage meltdown was coming way ahead of a lot of other players and took actions to both protect themselves and profit from it.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsand enjoyed reading the history of the firm
I worked at Goldman Sachs just after finishing my MBA, and enjoyed reading the history of the firm. Cohen has a writing style that is very detailed, but enjoyable to read.
Published 2 months ago by Deana
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Was a gift for my husband and he enjoyed it
Published 4 months ago by LMF
5.0 out of 5 starsInformative book
Great inside information re: Goldman Sachs
Published 6 months ago by adrian j fogata
4.0 out of 5 starsGood book
Interesting read and opens eyes about real workings of Wall Street . Good reference to major Wall Street major events.
Published 7 months ago by Tom D.
4.0 out of 5 starsWorth the Investment
An interesting perspective on Goldman’s rise and the issues it’s faced over the years. The focus is distinctly on the problems and not “how GS came to rule the world”. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Floccinaucinihilipilification
4.0 out of 5 starsThis book tells the story of Golman Sachs in terms ...
This book tells the story of Golman Sachs in terms of the top of the Corporation. I have never been told about a corporation before that was almost totally characterized by the top... Read more
Published 9 months ago by M.W.Heishman
3.0 out of 5 starsPaid by the word??
Very informative but twice as long as necessary to tell the story. Too repetitive. What happened to editors?
Published 10 months ago by Two Wheels
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Powerful story
Published 12 months ago by thomas
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Clearly informative. What a treat in the written word.
Published 13 months ago by Pearl A Grau
5.0 out of 5 starsGoldman Sachs
Fantastic book! It shows in details history of the Goldman Sachs, it's culture, it's principles. It is also very well written book, and very easy to read.
Published 13 months ago by Milan Remikovic
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November 29, 2021
In the fall of 1987, I took a break from grad school to work as a stockbroker. Between the time I passed my certification exams and the time I started working, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6% in a single day - the largest daily percentage drop in history. My career as a stockbroker was short-lived, but I gained a lesson in the risks of working in the investment world and it sparked my interest in the inner workings of Wall Street.
Former investment banker William Cohan has followed this world much more closely than I have and he used his knowledge to write his 2009 book "House of Cards", which tells the story of the collapse of Bear Stearns - a once-successful investment firm that failed and was sold cheaply to JP Morgan Chase in 2008.
Part 1 details the final days of Bear Stearns. BS was once the fifth-largest firm on Wall Street and its stock price closed at $171.51 per share in January 2007; but it was sold to JPMC for just $2 per share 14 months later.
The next section recounts the history of the firm and the significant people contributing to its growth and fighting for power within the organization.
The final section brings together the first two parts by focusing on the actions of individuals in the months leading up to Bear's collapse.
There were many reasons for Bear's downfall and there is plenty of blame to go around. The restrictions on lending had recently been relaxed and the US government encouraged banks to lend money to lower-income families - families that previously could not qualify for a mortgage. The greed of bankers took over as they began making high-risk loans, then selling those loans to investors. As property values fell, securities backed by mortgages on those properties also lost value. Many people defaulted on their mortgages causing further strain.
It did not help that a manager of one of Bear's funds repeatedly lied to his investors - understating the fund's investments in high-risk securities by an order of magnitude.
The book could have been shorter, but Cohan chose to go into detail about the histories, personalities, and eccentricities of many of the Bear executives. It helps to understand the egos (and sometimes the hubris) of the decision-makers who lead the company down this path.
Cohan shines a light on the fragility of the entire industry. Because so much of the securities industry is based on confidence, companies will often overstate their optimism and hide bad news in order to maintain higher prices. Conversely, once investors lose faith, they begin to abandon an investment or fund or firm and the collapse can accelerate rapidly.
Of course, Bear Stearns was not the only casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis. 2008 saw a major upheaval in the entire financial industry, resulting in the failure or weakening of several firms. In his epilogue, Cohan gives a brief account of the fall and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which occurred a few months after Bear Stearns's collapse.
2008 was a disastrous year for Wall Street and contributed to a national recession. The question remains: can we avoid a similar disaster in the future? The book does not answer this question.
Former investment banker William Cohan has followed this world much more closely than I have and he used his knowledge to write his 2009 book "House of Cards", which tells the story of the collapse of Bear Stearns - a once-successful investment firm that failed and was sold cheaply to JP Morgan Chase in 2008.
Part 1 details the final days of Bear Stearns. BS was once the fifth-largest firm on Wall Street and its stock price closed at $171.51 per share in January 2007; but it was sold to JPMC for just $2 per share 14 months later.
The next section recounts the history of the firm and the significant people contributing to its growth and fighting for power within the organization.
The final section brings together the first two parts by focusing on the actions of individuals in the months leading up to Bear's collapse.
There were many reasons for Bear's downfall and there is plenty of blame to go around. The restrictions on lending had recently been relaxed and the US government encouraged banks to lend money to lower-income families - families that previously could not qualify for a mortgage. The greed of bankers took over as they began making high-risk loans, then selling those loans to investors. As property values fell, securities backed by mortgages on those properties also lost value. Many people defaulted on their mortgages causing further strain.
It did not help that a manager of one of Bear's funds repeatedly lied to his investors - understating the fund's investments in high-risk securities by an order of magnitude.
The book could have been shorter, but Cohan chose to go into detail about the histories, personalities, and eccentricities of many of the Bear executives. It helps to understand the egos (and sometimes the hubris) of the decision-makers who lead the company down this path.
Cohan shines a light on the fragility of the entire industry. Because so much of the securities industry is based on confidence, companies will often overstate their optimism and hide bad news in order to maintain higher prices. Conversely, once investors lose faith, they begin to abandon an investment or fund or firm and the collapse can accelerate rapidly.
Of course, Bear Stearns was not the only casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis. 2008 saw a major upheaval in the entire financial industry, resulting in the failure or weakening of several firms. In his epilogue, Cohan gives a brief account of the fall and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which occurred a few months after Bear Stearns's collapse.
2008 was a disastrous year for Wall Street and contributed to a national recession. The question remains: can we avoid a similar disaster in the future? The book does not answer this question.
September 17, 2019
I love reading different books about the Great Recession, but I was a bit disappointed with this one. Though at least the book did live up to its subtitle - the author came through with hubris and wretched excess!
The book is bloated with unnecessary details. It's mostly tedious, but it is intermittently interesting. Several quotes are recounted more than once. I understand that authors like to use anecdotes and stories, but some of the ones in this book seem utterly irrelevant. Like the story about one exec's search for a specific cigar. Who cares? The book is long enough.
There are a lot of dick-measuring contests in this particular company (Bear Stearns), but frankly reading about them all gets boring.
One guy got his fee-fees hurt because the big man didn't give him what he wanted, so he basically stopped paying attention to what was going on. Which ultimately led to the collapse of their hedge funds, and eventually to the firm's own demise.
Much of the book is reportage that comes out as he said this, the other guy said that, and another guy said something else. Occasionally the author's own biases shine through, and some of them are ridiculous.
According to this author, the problem with subprime mortgages was solely due to the Clinton-era requirement that banks start lending to communities they hadn't done business with before. It's true these regulations meant more people with subpar credit were now able to get loans.
He conflates these lowered requirements with NINJA loans (No Income, No Job or Assets). Lowering the credit barrier is not the same as eliminating any requirements and making fraudulent loan applications. The looser regs did not require companies to throw out documentation altogether.
This also lets the investors (and the Fed) off the hook, though investors' greed certainly played a part in the meltdown too. Because the Fed was lowering interest rates, investors were greedy for yield. Well, you don't get fat yields off borrowers with good credit scores who prepay their loans. You get them from subprime borrowers, and if you're not getting enough the market manufactures more.
The author apparently has never heard of motivated reasoning. He was shocked - shocked! - that the hedge fund managers thought the beginning of the meltdown was just a temporary dislocation of the markets. Their entire business model rested on liquid mortgage markets, and they got paid to view the mortgage markets optimistically. With hindsight we know it wasn't a temporary dislocation. But at the time, not only was that not obviously the case, but the managers were motivated to think the markets would get back to functioning.
There's an epilogue that discusses Lehman Brothers, for... no apparent reason. It is not at all clear what that had to do with Bear. (It failed after Bear did, but Bear was rescued by JP Morgan backed by the government.)
Having said all that, it is interesting to see how the ethos that built Bear played a part in destroying it!
The book is bloated with unnecessary details. It's mostly tedious, but it is intermittently interesting. Several quotes are recounted more than once. I understand that authors like to use anecdotes and stories, but some of the ones in this book seem utterly irrelevant. Like the story about one exec's search for a specific cigar. Who cares? The book is long enough.
There are a lot of dick-measuring contests in this particular company (Bear Stearns), but frankly reading about them all gets boring.
One guy got his fee-fees hurt because the big man didn't give him what he wanted, so he basically stopped paying attention to what was going on. Which ultimately led to the collapse of their hedge funds, and eventually to the firm's own demise.
Much of the book is reportage that comes out as he said this, the other guy said that, and another guy said something else. Occasionally the author's own biases shine through, and some of them are ridiculous.
According to this author, the problem with subprime mortgages was solely due to the Clinton-era requirement that banks start lending to communities they hadn't done business with before. It's true these regulations meant more people with subpar credit were now able to get loans.
He conflates these lowered requirements with NINJA loans (No Income, No Job or Assets). Lowering the credit barrier is not the same as eliminating any requirements and making fraudulent loan applications. The looser regs did not require companies to throw out documentation altogether.
This also lets the investors (and the Fed) off the hook, though investors' greed certainly played a part in the meltdown too. Because the Fed was lowering interest rates, investors were greedy for yield. Well, you don't get fat yields off borrowers with good credit scores who prepay their loans. You get them from subprime borrowers, and if you're not getting enough the market manufactures more.
The author apparently has never heard of motivated reasoning. He was shocked - shocked! - that the hedge fund managers thought the beginning of the meltdown was just a temporary dislocation of the markets. Their entire business model rested on liquid mortgage markets, and they got paid to view the mortgage markets optimistically. With hindsight we know it wasn't a temporary dislocation. But at the time, not only was that not obviously the case, but the managers were motivated to think the markets would get back to functioning.
There's an epilogue that discusses Lehman Brothers, for... no apparent reason. It is not at all clear what that had to do with Bear. (It failed after Bear did, but Bear was rescued by JP Morgan backed by the government.)
Having said all that, it is interesting to see how the ethos that built Bear played a part in destroying it!
April 28, 2024
(The following was voice to texted, and at this point I've been tired already for a very long time,so please excuse my punctuation or spelling) I am so incredibly proud to be putting this entry into my Goodreads list. I doubt that I've ever worked so hard to finish a book in my life. It has taken me 6 or so months to read this book(Nov 2nd to April 27th). And I checked it out from the digital library nine times. And in hindsight, I probably chose the wrong medium for it (occasional Kindle reading). But I'll allow myself this entry to Pat myself on the back for not letting that stop me from completing it. I started trying to read this book 5 years ago and it was long before that. I believe that I had heard about it for the first time. This is the kind of book that I want to read and now that I finished one, I feel encouraged to read another two that are currently on my physical bookshelf at home . It was also a hard book to read because while I feel like I am more versed in these subjects than other people, the technical jargon and financial concepts were far above me, and so there were many a Wikipedia search that was required (another great reason to use Kindle). If you're interested in this book, read the first five chapters or so and the last five chapters or so and chapter 25 and the epilogue, most importantly. If you like to hear crazy stories about the 1%, and enjoy intricate descriptions of the history of a long dead investment firm that only your dad has probably ever heard of, then the middle bit is pretty entertaining. I egregiously highlighted this book (1058 individual highlights) and I am so grateful to Amazon for preserving these highlights between my checking this book in and out of my digital library. My intention is to go bank through these to spark my understanding of the story as well as listen to the audiobook version of this. And while I read this book on my phone exclusively, I will be in the market for a physical copy of this book to add to my shelf as a sort of trophy, though I never intend to read it all the way through again.
September 2, 2021
House of Cards is a long chronicle of the downfall of Bear Stearns and how Wall Street created a worldwide economic crisis through a combination of factors, greed among them. William Cohan's book begins with the 10 days in March 2008 that led to the selling of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase, then backtracks to the firm's beginnings. The bulk of the book narrates that history, up to that fateful weekend in March when the firm's leadership finally had to face facts. The relatively brief epilogue discusses the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the broader subprime mortgage crisis, and places the blame on just about everyone (except, perhaps, the unwitting individuals who wanted own their own homes but really couldn't afford to).
I listened to this book on audio, and while it was long, I didn't feel the slog and repetition that other readers reported, perhaps because I zoned out when the book got a little tedious. But reading about the eccentricities of Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne and the corporate infighting was rather interesting, though a bit irrelevant in the end. It was probably just as well that Cayne was out playing bridge when he should have been minding the store because he didn't know how to mind the store in the first place.
I read this book to find out what laws and regulations, or lack thereof, led to this mess, but unfortunately Cohan doesn't dig into that, except to say that the mortgage lending business was largely unregulated, the SEC imposed some rules that made things difficult for investment banks, and the Bush Administration was pushing for more home-ownership, basically encouraging these risky mortgages until the financial world realized that, at least in the short term, they were a terrific source of revenue. But, as the title says, they created a house of cards and it fell in on them.
I listened to this book on audio, and while it was long, I didn't feel the slog and repetition that other readers reported, perhaps because I zoned out when the book got a little tedious. But reading about the eccentricities of Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne and the corporate infighting was rather interesting, though a bit irrelevant in the end. It was probably just as well that Cayne was out playing bridge when he should have been minding the store because he didn't know how to mind the store in the first place.
I read this book to find out what laws and regulations, or lack thereof, led to this mess, but unfortunately Cohan doesn't dig into that, except to say that the mortgage lending business was largely unregulated, the SEC imposed some rules that made things difficult for investment banks, and the Bush Administration was pushing for more home-ownership, basically encouraging these risky mortgages until the financial world realized that, at least in the short term, they were a terrific source of revenue. But, as the title says, they created a house of cards and it fell in on them.
May 27, 2018
When I read recently that Congress was taking action to lift some of the regulations that were imposed on banks after the 2008 financial crisis, I decided I wanted to refresh my memory on how that mess started. I picked up William Cohan's work "House of Cards" because it dealt with the first major casualty of that crisis, the collapse of Bear Stearns, one of the country's largest investment banks.
After wading through Cohan's exhaustive work I came to several conclusions. First, a financial crisis seldom has one single cause. In this case it was a combination of factors that included lax lending standards, ill-conceived federal regulations to promote home ownership, and yes last but not least greed and fraud. It's probably safe to say that greed and fraud are the basic elements in just about every financial crisis and Cohan has done a wonderful job of portraying the main characters that were responsible for the downfall of Bear Stearns. I have to be candid and admit by the end of the book I was glad to bid these characters good riddance. They pretty much got what they deserved. Unfortunately about 14,0000 other employees were also affected by the collapse and for that it will remain a real tragedy in our financial system. It wasn't the first such institution brought down by a few bad managers and it won't be the last.
Nevertheless, I had to conclude that Cohan could probably have made the same points in a somewhat better edited manuscript that did not cover the same ground repeatedly.
After wading through Cohan's exhaustive work I came to several conclusions. First, a financial crisis seldom has one single cause. In this case it was a combination of factors that included lax lending standards, ill-conceived federal regulations to promote home ownership, and yes last but not least greed and fraud. It's probably safe to say that greed and fraud are the basic elements in just about every financial crisis and Cohan has done a wonderful job of portraying the main characters that were responsible for the downfall of Bear Stearns. I have to be candid and admit by the end of the book I was glad to bid these characters good riddance. They pretty much got what they deserved. Unfortunately about 14,0000 other employees were also affected by the collapse and for that it will remain a real tragedy in our financial system. It wasn't the first such institution brought down by a few bad managers and it won't be the last.
Nevertheless, I had to conclude that Cohan could probably have made the same points in a somewhat better edited manuscript that did not cover the same ground repeatedly.
December 12, 2021
Really good read - the first section was absolutely brilliant as a kind of minute-by-minute walk through the collapse of BS. The middle section was very entertaining in going through the history of the firm from the lens of its three larger-than-life CEOs. And then the last section kind of winds it all down with the run-up to the last days of the firm. At times hilarious and/or shocking, this is a great read with characters that might seem unbelievable if we didn't know they're all actual people. I think Cohan shines most in the first section as Bear Sterns spins around the drain over ten days in March 2008 and when he's detailing the BSAM catastrophe where Cioffi was able to run free without any significant oversight. (The hypothesized reasons for this regarding Spector's inattention and where that arose is both head-shaking and completely unsurprising when you consider that the only score that matters on Wall Street is your the size of your bottom line.) I don't think it's possible to have any single work shed light on al the factors that led to the subprime crisis because there are so many perspectives and so many areas where common sense failed, but this is an especially interesting story that has an insider feel on one of the first dominoes to fall.
January 29, 2023
The material here is INSANELY well-sourced and I think that's ultimately to the book's detriment, because the first and last parts are great and build to this horrific crescendo of greed and stupidity but the author clearly is way too eager to dump ALL his quotes and material in and ultimately, from a pacing standpoint, this means the back half of the book and the epilogue of all fucking chapters are complete drags. The epilogue spends a ton of time talking about the minutiae of Lehman's last few hours. It's a callback to the first part of the book that i understand, thematically, but makes no sense, structurally. A shame because again: the quotes are SO GOOD. The drama is NUTS. If the editor hadn't been asleep at the wheel, this book would be five stars. And to be honest, just google who Cy Lewis, Ace Greenberg, and Jimmy Cayne are, skip part 2 entirely, and you got yourself a good, tight read.
Also, there should have been more suicides. But this is a social complaint rather than an artistic one. I simply think if you're c-level and losing your entire net worth in a crisis you helped cause, you should jump out a window about it. Modern men are such babies.
Also, there should have been more suicides. But this is a social complaint rather than an artistic one. I simply think if you're c-level and losing your entire net worth in a crisis you helped cause, you should jump out a window about it. Modern men are such babies.
February 24, 2024
Full disclosure : I probably only understood about half of this true story of the financial profligacy, not to mention crimes, that led to the demise of Wall St firms Bear Sterns, Lehman Bros & others. But that also didn't stop me reading The Big Short, The Smartest Guys In The Room & similar tomes. I want to grasp how this parallel world operates, alongside our own. Naturally, no-one, even those most obviously responsible for the billions of dollars squandered through incompetence, or worse, ended up in prison; many only lost a portion of their vast fortunes - but not through any gov't penalty, simply because they had had to invest in the dodgy deals they were setting up for other investors. The more pages I turned the dirtier I felt. The amounts of money 'earned' in these 'professions' is obscene, especially when you consider the remuneration deemed appropriate for nurses, teachers & others who actually give a fuck about their fellow humans. Time now for another shower. In bleach.
February 27, 2023
Very very long, extremely detailed as is Cohan’s style. Well researched. Not light reading, certainly there were chapters that were of much less interest - yet one could argue, in sum, they lent context to the general arc of the tome. Cohan crafts a story out of a great deal of complete, total muck. The lack of sufficient governance to control an individual’s power. Overconfidence in the face of incompetence. Graft, fraud and other slights of hand carried out through highly complex, opaque financial structures and products. The danger of leverage in absence of a fundamental grasp of risk. The critical importance of ‘confidence’ in counterparties. And, as we see today, insufficient succession planning. Too big to fail? Too smart to fail? Fascinating and unfortunately, to quote Mark Twain, “history doesn’t repeat itself,but it does rhyme.” Cohan delivers on his aptly-titled book.
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