In a recent review of the book House of Cards by William D. Cohen, the International Herald Tribune writes:
“In March 2008, when the 85-year-old firm Bear Stearns — the United States’ 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 CEOs — and a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end.”
We’re recommending this book due to its insightful look into the new era we’ve entered, The Age of Turbulence. From the LA Times book review:
“It seems almost achingly quaint to recall those warm and hazy days when “banker” was a synonym for sobriety and propriety — a time when those who worked in finance, as well as those who reported on it, believed that a pinstriped suit connoted one thing and a chalk stripe something else entirely.
Anyone who still retains such antique illusions will lose them in fewer than 10 pages into “House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street,” William D. Cohan’s masterfully reported account of the collapse of Bear Stearns, the investment banking house whose implosion a year ago this month signaled the beginning of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
Check it out: House of Cards by William D. Cohen.
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