House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William
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House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William
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Condition:
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A book that has been read but is in excellent condition. No obvious damage to the cover, with the dust jacket included for hard covers. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, and no underlining/highlighting of text or writing in the margins. May be very minimal identifying marks on the inside cover. Very minimal wear and tear.
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Located in: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
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Item specifics
- Condition
- Narrative Type
- Nonfiction
- Intended Audience
- Adult
- Inscribed
- NO
- ISBN
- 9780385528269
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-10
0385528264
ISBN-13
9780385528269
eBay Product ID (ePID)
70927259
Product Key Features
Book Title
House of Cards : a Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
Number of Pages
480 Pages
Language
English
Publication Year
2009
Topic
Banks & Banking, Economic History, Finance / General, Corporate & Business History
Genre
Business & Economics
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Height
1.3 in
Item Weight
27.3 Oz
Item Length
9.6 in
Item Width
6.4 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2008-053915
Reviews
"Engrossing....[Cohan] 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 does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping - and almost immediately comprehensible - to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading" --Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times "Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders" --BusinessWeek "Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." --Los Angeles Times "A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM)." --The Economist "A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion--a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today....meticulous reporting.....first drafts of history don't get much better than this" --Bloomberg, "Engrossing....[Cohan] 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 does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping and almost immediately comprehensible to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading" --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders" -- BusinessWeek "Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." -- Los Angeles Times "A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM)." -- The Economist "A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion--a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today....meticulous reporting.....first drafts of history don't get much better than this" -- Bloomberg, "Engrossing....[Cohan] 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 does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping - and almost immediately comprehensible - to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading" --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders" -- BusinessWeek "Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." -- Los Angeles Times "A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM)." -- The Economist "A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion--a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today....meticulous reporting.....first drafts of history don't get much better than this" -- Bloomberg, Praise for theNew York Timesbestseller THE LAST TYCOONS, winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award "Cohan's portrayal of the firm's dominant partners-whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book's operatic melodramas- makes this an epic. . . . In fact,The Last Tycoonsbears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald'sThe Last Tycoon." -New York Times Book Review "Breezy and highly readable. . . . For those of us who enjoy high-level gossip (most people) and an inside look at the machinations, triumphs, failures, and foibles of some of Wall Street's and America's most exalted personages, Cohan's book is entertaining and seductively engrossing." -Chicago Tribune "Cohan's thoroughness-he interviewed over 100 current and former bankers and assorted bigwigs-unearths a trove of colourful tidbits, many quite racy. . . . Illuminating are Mr. Cohan's descriptions of the scheming, politicking, and general dysfunction that was Lazard." -Economist "Cohan not only knows where the bodies are buried but got a guided tour of the graveyard." -Financial Times "[The Last Tycoons] has sent a jolt through Lazard and the rest of Wall Street." -Wall Street Journal
Dewey Edition
22
Dewey Decimal
332.660973
Synopsis
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. The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns' miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm's demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company). Cohan's explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR'S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE. 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., 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. The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns' miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm's demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company). Cohan's explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR'S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE. 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.
LC Classification Number
HG4930.5.C64 2009
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- 7***j (853)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseI recently purchased an item from this eBay seller, and I couldn't be happier with the experience. From the prompt communication to the fast shipping, everything was handled with utmost professionalism. The item arrived exactly as described and was well-packaged to ensure its safety during transit. The seller was courteous and responsive, making the entire transaction smooth and hassle-free. I highly recommend this seller to anyone looking for quality products and excellent service.
- .***m (89)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseFor some reason, the Postal Tracking stopped after the label was created, but I RECEIVED the book I ordered on August 2nd which was within the 7/31 to 8/6 projected delivery range. The sale price was lower than the competition why I chose this Seller. It was well packed, and arrived in the described condition. I would do business, again, with this Seller without hesitation. Thumbs UP!
- 0***0 (139)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseAnother wonderful transaction with this company! I believe this is my 3rd purchase with multiple books in each order and I’ve yet to be disappointed. Books arrived as described - great used condition. Packaging wasn’t great but it’s free shipping and they made it to me intact, so no complaints. The price is unbeatable. Will definitely continue to purchase from them! Highly recommend.My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman (#297449436378)
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- b***e (217)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseProduct just as described and mailed quickly.
- 7***j (853)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseI recently purchased an item from this eBay seller, and I couldn't be happier with the experience. From the prompt communication to the fast shipping, everything was handled with utmost professionalism. The item arrived exactly as described and was well-packaged to ensure its safety during transit. The seller was courteous and responsive, making the entire transaction smooth and hassle-free. I highly recommend this seller to anyone looking for quality products and excellent service.
- .***m (89)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseFor some reason, the Postal Tracking stopped after the label was created, but I RECEIVED the book I ordered on August 2nd which was within the 7/31 to 8/6 projected delivery range. The sale price was lower than the competition why I chose this Seller. It was well packed, and arrived in the described condition. I would do business, again, with this Seller without hesitation. Thumbs UP!
- 0***0 (139)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseAnother wonderful transaction with this company! I believe this is my 3rd purchase with multiple books in each order and I’ve yet to be disappointed. Books arrived as described - great used condition. Packaging wasn’t great but it’s free shipping and they made it to me intact, so no complaints. The price is unbeatable. Will definitely continue to purchase from them! Highly recommend.My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman (#297449436378)