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

Written by:
William D. Cohan
Narrated by:
Alan Sklar

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
2
Narrator
Release Date
April 2009
Duration
25 hours 0 minutes
Summary
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.
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tom

I am only about 6 discs into this but find it fascinating. The free fall and extinction of companies like this and Enron make for riveting listening. This isn't just some mom and pop operation that folds over a few million bucks.....this is a world class firm with an 85 year history that disappears in a few days, along with billions of dollars. The sheer magnitude of the collapse and ruination of thousands of careers is like watching a train wreck unfold. Great, important, wealthy people with the best paying jobs on the planet.........it's all gone for them overnite. The dark side of capitalism chronicled in a captivating narrative.

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