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

US: William D. Cohan, 1672. First Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine/Near Fine. In excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlig hting. The spine remains undamaged. On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a po st on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement abo ut Bear Stearns & Co., the nation's fifth-largest investment bank: "In my b ook, 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 colossal ly profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding. Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financia l meltdown of 2008 had begun. How this happened - and why - is the subject of William D. Cohan's superb a nd 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 infi ghting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought ha voc on the world financial system. Cohan's minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breat hless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the casc ading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fe d Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the worl d economy should the company go bankrupt. But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredib.