“House of Cards” Book Signing & Reception March 28th (6-8 pm) YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS!

by Auntie M on Mar 26, 2009

“As Cohan’s remarkable new work of financial journalism shows, the current mess began when the investment bankers began to treat everyone else’s finances like their private ATM.” (from Los Angeles Times Review)

It’s not everyday a book of this importance about something so important (and complicated) is written in such an engaging, understandable and compelling way. Rarer still, is when that book is written by your neighbor!

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by best-selling author and Ancramdale resident, William Cohan, is that book.

Hammertown is delighted to have Bill Cohan with us at this booksigning/reception at The Barn on Saturday, March 28th from 6-8 pm. Everyone, from NPR to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to CNBC has been talking to Bill Cohan…now you can too!

More About the Book…

House of Cards is more than a journalistic recounting of the beginning of the financial meltdown and the hysteria surrounding it. Bill, unlike most of the financial gurus on cable TV or Wall Street, beautifully tells us WHY it happened. It is a well-written and entertaining cautionary tale of greed, fear and arrogance that has all the makings of a brilliant screenplay.

“Cohan brings readers inside the boardroom where you can actually feel the tension as key executives were being flooded by frantic BlackBerry messages about major hedge fund customers pulling billions of dollars from their accounts.” (Gloria McDonough Taub, CNBC)

(from the Publishers)
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.

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.

(Read Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The New York Observer, and Chicago Tribune and CNBC.com reviews to learn more about this noteworthy book. Cohan talks to Steve Inskeep about the fall of Bear Stearns and one of the figures in the center of it all: then-Chairman Jimmy Cayne on NPR’s Morning Edition. Lastly, read an Op-Ed by Cohan entitled, “A Tsunami of Excuses” in the New York Times.)