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

[RamboLiberal]

Author was on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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.

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In March 2008 when the 85-year-old firm Bear Stearns — the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, which had survived every crisis of the 20th century, from the Great Depression to the market dive of 1987 without a single losing quarter — crashed and burned in little over a week, it became a harbinger of the credit crisis that snowballed later in the year and led to the current global financial meltdown. As William D. Cohan makes clear in his engrossing new book, “House of Cards,” Bear Stearns is also a kind of microcosm of what went wrong on Wall Street — from bad business decisions to a lack of oversight to greedy, arrogant C.E.O.’s — and a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end.

Mr. Cohan, a former investment banker and the author of “The Last Tycoons,” a 2007 book about Lazard Frères & Company, gives us in these pages 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.

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 — and almost immediately comprehensible — to the lay reader. While the broader outlines of the Bear Sterns 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/books/10kaku.html?bl&ex=1236916800&en=2ca99d67ca5bac74&ei=5087%0A