Author(s): William Cohen

Business

On March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns, an eighty-five-year-old financial institution, sold itself for an outrageously low price to the $2 trillion behemoth JP Morgan Chase. Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun. What went wrong?

In House of Cards, bestselling author and former investment banker William Cohan gives us a front-row seat at Wall Street's catastrophic unravelling at the seams, and the end of its Second Gilded Age. Through the prism of Bear Sterns, he shows how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making have wrought havoc on the world financial system. Cohan's minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, as the US government and federal banks began to realise the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, 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.
House of Cards is a shocking tale of greed, arrogance and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequence for all of us.