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.
In March 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling eighty-four-year-old financial institution, was forced to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for an outrageously low price in a deal brokered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was desperately trying to prevent the impending catastrophic market crash. But mere months before, an industry-wide boom had "the Bear" clocking a record high stock price. How did a giant investment bank with $18 billion in cash on hand disappear in a mere ten days? In this tour de force, Cohan provides a minute-by-minute account of the events that brought America's second Gilded Age to an end.
Filled with intimate portraits of the major players, high-end gossip, and smart financial analysis, House of Cards recounts in delicious narrative form the dramatic events behind the fall of Bear Stearns and what it revealed about the financial world's progression from irrational boom to cataclysmic bust. House of Cards is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the dramatic and the unprecedented events that have reshaped Wall Street and global finance in the past two years.
CNBC financial reporter Cohan's account of the sudden collapse of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns last March is largely interview based. This fine production is undoubtedly only the first of many books on the current market crisis, and Alan Sklar is the perfect narrator for conveying the tough vernacularism of these (almost-entirely) male voices. The cast is large, hard to keep track of, and through the book's long first part--a "minute-by-minute" reconstruction of the collapse--each voice recounts a variation on the same basic epiphany: "We're finished." The voices merge into one, and what comes across most distinctly is Sklar's rendition of the Wall Street personality: brusque, cynical, assured to the point of arrogance--the voice of hubris. D.A.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
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