House of Cards
At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. House of Cards is a blistering narrative of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis. It exposes the corporate arrogance, power struggles, and deadly combination of greed and inattention, which led to the collapse of not only Bear Stearns but the very foundations of Wall Street.
Praise for House of Cards
“Engrossing, a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end. Riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading.”
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Cohan's epic account chronicles a watershed moment in Wall Street history.”
— The Boston Globe
"Masterfully reported. [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."
"A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns’ implosion—a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today. First drafts of history don't get much better than this."
“This book is so rich, so flavorful, so instructive, and so fully and compelling cast that a reviewer hardly knows where to begin.”
— The New York Observer
"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, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders. Hard to put down."
— BusinessWeek
"[A]n authoritative, blow-by-blow account of the collapse of Bear Stearns."
“Cohen’s autopsy uncovers all the symptoms of a walking disaster.”
— Newsweek
"A riveting blow-by-blow account."