Bear Stearns

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street

by Kate Kelly  · 14 Apr 2009  · 258pp  · 71,880 words

copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. http://us.penguingroup.com To the 14,000 people who worked at Bear Stearns CAST OF CHARACTERS At The Bear Stearns Companies Alan Schwartz, chief executive Sam Molinaro, chief financial officer Bob Upton, treasurer Tom Marano, head of mortgages Paul Friedman, chief operating

…

Board Kevin Warsh, governor of the Federal Reserve Board At the U.S. Department of the Treasury Hank Paulson, secretary Bob Steel, undersecretary Advisers to Bear Stearns Gary Parr, deputy chairman of Lazard Ltd. Rodge Cohen, chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP Dennis Block, senior partner, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP At J.

…

PREFACE This book was born of a three-part series I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in May 2008 about the demise of The Bear Stearns Companies. Published two and a half months after a devastating run on the investment bank, the articles detailed the battle for survival that had

…

stories to read. “Then,” he told me, “they’ll understand what happened to Daddy’s career.” His words underscored the brutal impact that the Bear Stearns collapse—and the credit crisis that spurred it—has had on hundreds of thousands of workers in the U.S. economy. For Street Fighters, I

…

February 2009 THURSDAY March 13, 2008 5:30 P.M. Early on the evening of Thursday, March 13, Sam Molinaro, chief financial officer of The Bear Stearns Companies, called the firm’s CEO, Alan Schwartz. “We have a serious problem,” Molinaro said. Up in his forty-second-floor office, Schwartz had

…

cover of Barron’s from 2004, when the publication had run an admiring cover story on Bear. Under the teaser “Throughout the market slide, Bear Stearns had outperformed its brethren” was a cartoonlike drawing of a brown bear dipping its paw into a honey pot as saliva dripped from its chops

…

soon took an interest as well. Meanwhile, trouble was brewing on another front. One of the hedge funds in Bear’s own money-management unit, Bear Stearns Asset Management, was struggling. Year to date, its performance had fallen 23 percent, and shocked investors were demanding their money back. But the fund’s

…

when he got the call. “Chris, there’s an important opportunity here and things are moving very quickly,” Parr told him. “I’m working with Bear Stearns.” Parr briefly explained the situation, saying that an immediate investment or quick turnaround deal was going to be essential. “How quickly do you want to

…

his birthday party and retreated to his Upper East Side apartment. The buyout executive explained his situation. He’d gotten a call that night from Bear Stearns, he said, and he understood Dimon had, too. It sounded like there could be an attractive opportunity there, but only for a fast-moving

…

and was blasted all over computer news feeds and on CNBC. “JP Morgan Chase and Federal Reserve Board of New York to Provide Financing to Bear Stearns,” it read. The release went on to say that the bank and the government would together lend Bear “secured funding,” or money backed by

…

collateral, for “an initial period of up to 28 days.” Its last sentence was the most intriguing: “JPMorgan Chase is working closely with Bear Stearns on securing permanent financing or other alternatives for the company.” Then, at 9:21, a similarly worded release from Bear was issued. This one contained

…

Gary Cohn wondered why it was so chaotic. When things finally settled down, Paulson was the first to speak. “I want you to deal with Bear Stearns as a responsible counterparty,” he told the group. “When you’re at a company, you think about protecting yourself at all times,” he added.

…

in four or five hours—not forty-five minutes after the opening. Among investors, the crisis of confidence had returned in force. “People realized that Bear Stearns just came out the other day saying everything was fine,” Paul Nolte, director of investments at the small firm Hinsdale Associates, told the Dow Jones

…

in Europe and Asia, where firms like Goldman Sachs had expanded rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s, was extremely weak, and its internal money manager, Bear Stearns Asset Management, was by far the smallest on Wall Street. Before the hedge fund blowups of 2007, BSAM had just $60 billion under management—far

…

this horrible reaction.” “Perception is JP is going to cherry-pick a few divisions, and let the rest of BSC”—the stock-ticker abbreviation for Bear Stearns Companies—“go under,” the Barclay’s trader added. “It seems to be wrong, but the [market] is killing it.” “Killing it is an understatement.” “

…

Schwartz stayed at such a lean and undistinguished investment bank, in which he was clearly the star player. “Alan is the finest boutique in the Bear Stearns mall,” Bear’s competitors would occasionally say. Many thought a man of Schwartz’s talents deserved a platform like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, where

…

, Schwartz told the group that “all options [were] on the table.” But he didn’t want to be rash. If the time came when Bear Stearns appeared more vulnerable, he added, he would look more closely at possible deals. During the question-and-answer session that followed, David Schoenthal, the hard

…

firm, Oliver Wyman, to suggest ways to streamline the risk-management process and bring the technology and oversight up to date. That winter one of Bear Stearns’s major clients and trading partners, the Newport Beach, California, money manager PIMCO, had admonished senior fixed-income managers about the need for a deeper

…

over the weekend?” Schwartz recapped the conversation. Paulson had said that enough was enough. He wouldn’t stay up another night, all night, worrying about Bear Stearns. He had reminded Schwartz of their conversation early that morning in which he had asked the CEO if he really wanted to accept the government

…

-mail at 12:26 A.M. Saturday morning that summed up how most of Bear’s senior traders and managers were feeling. “Plan to Save Bear Stearns—Important—Please Read” was addressed to Schwartz, Marano, Mayer, and other top players in the fixed-income division. Written on Bainlardi’s laptop at

…

, served graciously by a waiter in formal attire. Cayne viewed himself as indisputably in charge. “I’m going to be the last CEO of Bear Stearns,” he would occasionally say, leaving companions to wonder what his plan was. Would he actually be willing to sell the company before passing it on

…

leaving Lehman Brothers to swoop in instead. Ironically, Cayne would later hire Neuberger’s former head, Jeff Lane, to salvage his own flailing money manager, Bear Stearns Asset Management, after the two internal hedge funds blew up. Those who sought Cayne’s help with the more nitty-gritty aspects of Bear’s

…

business was booming. At the same time, Bear was exploring new business arenas—albeit a bit later than many of its rivals. It was expanding Bear Stearns Asset Management, which had recruited top players from both within and outside the firm, was branching into the growing energy-trading business, and was building

…

—all the important things in life. He so excels at these that you might think it would give deep inferiority complexes to his colleagues at Bear Stearns. But if you think that, you don’t know much about his colleagues.” Sitting in his Omaha office, Buffett picked up the phone, to

…

Flowers’s surprise. “I’m calling about Bear Stearns,” Flowers began. “Should I go on?” Buffett almost had to chuckle. It was sort of like having a woman standing in front of you

…

economy as we work our way through this situation, and again, the stability of our financial system. That’s—” Stephanopoulos interrupted. “What would happen if Bear Stearns didn’t get this loan?” “I’m not going to speculate, George,” Paulson replied. He defended the Fed’s decision. What the pundits would say

…

could only imagine. “I think the big question on a lot of people’s minds is, are there other banks in a situation similar to Bear Stearns’s right now?” Stephanopoulos asked. “Is this just the beginning?” “Well, our financial institutions, our banks and investment banks, are very strong,” Paulson said. “

…

wanted to know. At one point, Blitzer became confrontational. “Tell the taxpayers who are watching right now why you decided to bail out, in effect, Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest investment house in the United States, which, only a couple of days ago, seemed to be on the verge of collapse, primarily

…

institutions.” After reiterating that, he added that “we’ve been going through turmoil in the capital markets for a while.” “Why did you bail out Bear Stearns?” Blitzer demanded. Paulson stammered. “There are ongoing discussions right now,” he said. “I’ve been on the phone for a couple of days straight,

…

outcome of that situation is,” he finally said. After more circular discussion, Blitzer hit on the money question. “If you wouldn’t have bailed out Bear Stearns, what would have happened?” he asked. “Wolf, I’m not going to speculate about what-ifs,” Paulson said. “Our number-one priority,” he added, “

…

. 7:00 P.M. At 7:05, the deal was announced to the world. “J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. announced it is acquiring The Bear Stearns Companies Inc.,” read a press release issued by both firms. “Directors of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction.” As part of the deal, the

…

in funding for Bear’s “less liquid assets.” The release contained the requisite complimentary quotes from Dimon, who stated that his company would “stand behind Bear Stearns,” and from Schwartz, who called the deal “the best outcome” for “all constituencies” after what had been “an incredibly difficult time” for the company.

…

readers cold came at the end of the second paragraph: The transaction “would have a value of approximately $2 per share.” That valued the mighty Bear Stearns, once Wall Street’s fifth-biggest investment bank with a market value of $25 billion, at a paltry $236 million—less than a quarter

…

You’ve done a remarkable job in working this through.” Schwartz shook his head, trying to collect himself. “I feel terrible,” he finally said. EPILOGUE Bear Stearns, as it turned out, was only the first in a long string of financial firms to suffer mortal harm. Faced with the same toxic combination

…

at the investment adviser Primerica, in January 2009 Bob Upton landed as treasurer of the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Comparing Cantor to an old-school Bear Stearns, Upton has told associates that, after a difficult period of uncertainty in his career, he is fired up and ready to get to work

…

office every day and still works with his longtime clients. NOTES Thursday 14 reducing their balance levels: Kate Kelly, “The Fall of Bear Stearns: Fear, Rumors Touched off Fatal Run on Bear Stearns,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2008. 17 Thursday morning brought another big blow: Kate Kelly and Serena Ng, “In Dealing with

…

: The Wall Street Journal, Who’s Who and What’s What on Wall Street (Ballantine Books, 1998). 26 small stock-trading house: “A History of Bear Stearns,” graphic, New York Times, March 17, 2008. 27 distressed quasi-public investments: Charles Kaiser, “Salim L. Lewis, Wall St. Pioneer in Stock Block Trading,

…

spoke out on behalf of Senator John Kerry: “Bids & Offers,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2004. 104 Bear’s Dallas office in 1976: Landon Thomas, “Bear Stearns Heir Apparent Tries to Restore Some Faith,” New York Times, August 7, 2007. 108 Cayne had been hospitalized: William D. Cohan, “The Trials of Jimmy

…

CEO’s Handling of Crisis Raises Issues,” Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2007. 111 PIMCO, had admonished: Kate Kelly, “The Fall of Bear Stearns: Lost Opportunities Haunt Final Days of Bear Stearns,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2008. Saturday 134 site had already pointed out: Kate Kelly, “Where in the World Is Jimmy Cayne

…

Rise and Fall of Jimmy Cayne,” Fortune, August 18, 2008. 136 His market-risk gatherings . . . “you’re out, O-U-T”: Michael Siconolfi, “Talented Outcasts: Bear Stearns Prospers Hiring Daring Traders That Rival Firms Shun,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1993. 137 He excoriated employees who left their desks: Alan C. Greenberg

…

my side”: Cohan, “The Rise and Fall,” Fortune, August 18, 2008. 146 In 2003, Bear for the first time: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Bear Stearns Co., Form 10-K, February 27, 2004. 146 richest chief executive: Susanne Craig, “The Biggest Fish on Wall Street? Probably Not Who You Think,” Wall

…

Fair, August 1, 2008. 225 “how this happened”: Kate Kelly, “The Fall of Bear Stearns: Lost Opportunities Haunt Final Days of Bear Stearns,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2008. 225 an outraged Bear broker: Kate Kelly, “The Fall of Bear Stearns: Bear Stearns Neared Collapse Twice in Frenzied Last Days,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2008. 225-

…

6 That Easter weekend . . . accepted the new terms: Ibid. 226 “I personally apologize”: Kate Kelly et al., “The Fall of Bear Stearns: Bear’s Final Moment,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2008. 227 “Barry Fox, a manager”: Kate Kelly, “Crisis on Wall Street: His Job at Bear

…

grateful to have had access to the following works, which aided my research and writing: Bill Bamber and Andrew Spencer. Bear Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008. New York: Brick Tower Press, 2008. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR

…

Bank One bankruptcy Bear’s consideration of Chapter Chapter debtor-in-possession financing and of Lehman opening for business and Barclays Bank Barron’s Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM) Bear Stearns Companies: annual media-industry conference of bankruptcy considered by bond-sales department of capital levels of corporate culture at crisis of confidence and

…

debt load of downgrading of due diligence meetings at equities division of Bear Stearns Companies (cont.) executive committee of 15c3-3 money of fixed-income department of headquarters of hedge fund servicing and lending unit of investor conference

…

monitoring of secrecy at shutting down wire at top management of trading division of year-end management meetings at see also specific people and divisions “Bear Stearns Trades” Begleiter, Steve Bernanke, Ben Bienen, Henry Black, Debbie Black, Steve deal price range and at Saturday meetings Blankfein, Lloyd Blitzer, Wolf Block, Dennis

…

s calls with at Goldman TV appearances of Paulson, John Paulson, Wendy Peloton Partners LLP Perelman, Ronald Peretié, Michel Petrie, Milton PIMCO “Plan to Save Bear Stearns—Important—Please Read” Portney, Emily Presidential Advisory Committee President’s Working Group on Financial Markets prime brokerage division, Bear attempted sale of Goldman group and

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal

by Ludwig B. Chincarini  · 29 Jul 2012  · 701pp  · 199,010 words

Market Collapse What Was the Quant Crisis? The Erratic Behavior of Quant Factors Causes of the Quant Crisis The Shed Show Chapter 9: The Bear Stearns Collapse A Brief History of the Bear Shadow Banking Window Dressing Repo Power The Unexpected Hibernation The Polar Spring Chapter 10: Money for Nothing and

…

Strategies and Global Alpha hedge fund at Goldman Sachs. Jimmy Cayne: Chairman of the Board of Bear Stearns during the financial crisis. Former CEO of Bear Stearns. Ralph Cioffi: Managing Director of Bear Stearns Asset Management and head of two Bear Stearn hedge funds that collapsed in 2007. Jon Corzine: Former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Meriwether'

…

Alberto Giovannini: Senior strategist at LTCM. Currently CEO and founder of Unifortune SGR. Ace Greenberg: Chairman of the Executive Committee of Bear Stearns during the financial crisis of 2008. CEO of Bear Stearns from 1978 to 1993. Alan Greenspan: Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. Joseph Gregory: President and Chief Operating

…

David Modest: Principal at LTCM. Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan and currently at the Soros Fund. Samuel Molinaro: CFO of Bear Stearns during Bear Stearns collapse. Paul Mozer: Salomon Brothers trader who made illegal bids in the Treasury auction causing Meriwether and Gutfreund to resign from Salomon. Peter Muller: Former

…

agreed to inject new capital into LTCM and mount a rescue if no one else took over the fund. The counterparties included Bankers Trust, Barclays, Bear Stearns, Chase, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, UBS, Paribas, Salomon Smith Barney, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, Morgan Stanley

…

First Boston, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter each contributed $300 million. Societe Generale contributed $125 million; Paribas and Lehman Brothers each contributed $100 million. Bear Stearns contributed nothing.13 LTCM’s partners retained their jobs, but would be overseen by a steering committee made up of consortium members. The bailout used

…

Sumitomo Bank (about $100 million); Credit Suisse (around $55 million); Merrill Lynch employees’ deferred payment program (around $22 million); Liechtenstein Global Trust (around $30 million); Bear Stearns executives, including Jimmy Cayne, Warren Spector, and Vinny Mattone (about $20 million total); PaineWebber chairman Donald Marron (about $10 million); McKinsey & Co. executives (about $10

…

That’s when the world woke up. That could be the wake-up call. That margin call. —Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns (Cohan 2010) Overcoming Cayne’s resistance, Bear Stearns took over counterparties’ repo positions on the less-levered fund, a move designed to relieve the stress the hedge funds felt from

…

,” and had experienced “nonperformance of offsetting hedges.” Collateral markdowns had left the funds unable to meet margin calls, and Sowood needed help.8 The Bear Stearns and Sowood hedge fund failures alerted markets to the possibility of spillover effects from problems in the credit and housing markets, though most investors treated

…

auditor, warned investors in the 2006 audited financial statements that the fund’s own managers had estimated the majority of the fund’s net assets. Bear Stearns did not release this report until May 2007 (FCIC Report 2010). 2. Subprime securities are collateralized mortgages or other securities that depend on the

…

been very distressed by that fact. —Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of Federal Reserve, Congressional Testimony, October 28, 2008 A Brief History of the Bear Bear Stearns is widely considered one of the great small Wall Street firms (despite its location at 383 Madison Avenue in New York). The company was originally

…

professional bridge player; finances eventually pushed him to find a real job. After interviews with Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns, he took a position at Bear. In 1985, Bear Stearns became a public firm with ticker symbol BSC. It was a full-service investment firm with divisions in investment banking, institutional

…

equities, fixed-income securities, individual investor services, and mortgage-related products. In 1997, Bear Stearns came under investigation by the SEC for its role as a clearing broker for a smaller brokerage named A.R. Baron, which had gone bankrupt

…

was manipulating stock prices and conducting unauthorized trading while raiding customer accounts. The case was eventually settled in 1999, with Bear Stearns paying $51 million in fines and restitution.3 Bear Stearns grew rapidly and did well mainly due to its prime brokerage and clearance business. It offered a wide suite of services

…

supply [to securitize], we decided we needed to get closer to the source of the collateral. —Tom Marano, January 10, 2005 (Sargent 2005) Many Bear Stearns senior executives were early LTCM investors, including Jimmy Cayne, Vinny Mattone, and firm co-president Warren Spector. When LTCM was on the brink of bankruptcy

…

(Boyd 2008) Former CEO James Cayne testified to the Financial Crisis Query Commission: [The firm’s collapse] was due to overwhelming market forces that Bear Stearns…could not resist. The market’s loss of confidence, even though it was unjustified and irrational, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The efforts we made

…

weekends. It was a great company with great people. We were a special family. Bear was synonymous with my soul. I loved Bear Stearns. —Jimmy Cayne interview, former CEO of Bear Stearns, April 12, 2012 As spring rolled into summer, the mortgage markets were still unhealthy. Everyone had seemed to have forgotten how

…

company ownership, giving the investor the advantage of surprise. This practice is against security regulation laws. The SEC and Justice Department filed several lawsuits against Bear Stearns for these practices; all were settled. 2. Cayne's bridge team won the Reisinger national bridge championship in the Fall of 2011, as well

…

leverage. All the major investment banks operating in the United States at the end of 2007 were in the mortgage market: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch. Many of these banks also enjoyed consistently high profits from 2000

…

The Profits of Major Investment Banks and Federal Agencies Note: The other banks' average consists of Morgan Stanley, Citi, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, and J.P. Morgan. GSE Average is the average profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Some investment banks, including Lehman Brothers, were big mortgage

…

securitizers. Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs issued lots of CMOs and other derivatives based on underlying mortgages. All the banks had high leverage ratios, though their ratios were

…

markets, including the commercial real estate and credit markets, where Lehman was particularly active. These concerns escalated in June and July 2007, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds imploded, leading to panic in the credit markets and more general concerns that the subprime crisis would spill into the broader economy. On

…

so that depositors would not worry about losing their savings to bank failures.46 Investment banks do not have this guarantee on their customer deposits. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both failed after classic runs on the bank. But these weren’t ordinary people withdrawing their deposits. Institutions withdrew their credit,

…

Scott Alvarez, General Counsel of the Federal Reserve, interview with the Washington Post (September 2, 2010) This is hardly plausible. First, they did something for Bear Stearns in March 2008. And within days of the Lehman collapse, authorities let Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley convert to bank holding companies, which Fuld had

…

other participants aren’t willing to bear. In this respect, many of these hedge funds complement the dealers’ function.2 Dealers, including Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, perform similar market functions. They stand ready to buy when the market is rushing to sell and stand ready to

…

and high Sharpe ratios. Their assets under management, however, would shrink rapidly when the markets encountered the 2008 financial atomic bombs; the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; and big, fast asset withdrawals from customers desperate for cash. The year of 2008 didn’t just mark the death of the

…

JWMP, partly because of burnout and partly to pursue other opportunities.1 Then came 2008’s financial crisis. The housing market collapse, the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, many commercial banks, and Freddie and Fannie badly disrupted capital markets. Funds in the business of providing leveraged liquidity were in the

…

end of February, JWMP began to unwind some of its risk. The Bear and the Gorilla Attack Then came the institutional bank run on Bear Stearns in March 2008. Bear Stearns, a major prime broker and liquidity provider for hedge funds, was heading for bankruptcy. Dimon and J.P. Morgan bought it at

…

governmental organizations started behaving more like risky hedge funds during this period, all without telling anyone. That included AIG, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and most of all Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Some of these institutions used leverage that was as high as or higher than what LTCM

…

of proprietary trading. Bibliography “A Guide to FRB/US. A Macroeconomic Model of the United States.” Macroeconomic and Quantitative Studies Federal Reserve Note, October 1996. “Bear Stearns’ Jimmy Cayne’s Profane Tirade Against Treasury’s Geithner.” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2009. “Berkshire Hathaway Report 10-Q.” June 30, 2008. “Budget

…

. “Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation’s 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements.” United States General Accounting Office Report to the Congress, July 1996. “Former CEO Says Bear Stearns' Collapse Unavoidable.” Right Vision News, May 7, 2010. “Fuld of Experience.” The Economist, April 24, 2008. “German Landesbanks: Deep Impact. A Revealing Dispute over

…

Risk Measurement, Standards and Monitoring.” BIS Publication, December 2010. Bebchuk, Lucian A., Alma Cohen, and Holder Spamann. “The Wages of Failure: Executive Compensation at Bear Stearns and Lehman 2000-2008.” Harvard Law Economics Discussion Paper, November 24, 2009. Becker, Bernie and Ben White. “Lehman’s Chief Defends His Actions as Prudent

…

Sachs Asset Management Presentation, December 13, 2007. Goldman Sachs Asset Management. “The Quantity Liquidity Crunch.” Goldman Sachs Global Quantitative Equity Report, August 2007. Goldstein, Matthew. “Bear Stearns to the Rescue—Sort Of.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 22, 2007. Goldstein, Matthew. “Bear’s Big Loss Arouses SEC Interest.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 25, 2007.

…

John M. and Dragon Yongjun Tang. “Did Credit Rating Agencies Make Unbiased Assumptions on CDOs?” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, May 2011. Grynbaum, Michael M. “Bear Stearns Profit Plunges 61% on Subprime Woes.” New York Times, September 21, 2007. Guberman, Ross. “Balancing Act.” The Washingtonian, August 2002. Hagerty, James R. “Freddie

…

Non-Crisis Risk in Financial Markets: A Unified Approach to Risk Management.” Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1160273, July 15, 2008. Morgensen, Gretchen. “Bear Stearns Says Battered Hedge Funds Are Worth Little.” New York Times, July 18, 2007. Morgenson, Gretchen and Joshua Rosner. Reckless Endangerment. How Outsized Ambition, Greed,

…

trust between trust in Barclays Barclays Global Investors (BGI) Basel Committee: Basel I document Basel II document financial crisis and guidelines of overview of Bear Stearns: bank run on collapse of failure of hedge funds of history and reputation of J.P. Morgan and leverage of LTCM and near-collapse of

…

Clearinghouses Client services Clinton, Bill CMBS securities CMBX index CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations) Collateral-backed bonds Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs): AIG and Basel Committee and Bear Stearns and overview of ratings agencies and Collateralized lending agreement (CLA) Collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) Commercial paper, trust in Commercial real estate Commodity Futures Modernization Act

…

FDIC) Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association. See Freddie Mac Federal National Mortgage Association. See Fannie Mae Federal Reserve (Fed). See also Bernanke, Ben; Greenspan, Alan Bear Stearns and as coordinator of last resort Greece and interest rates and Lehman Brothers and Felder, Eric Fidelity Investments Financial crisis of 2008. See also Lessons

…

bonds issued by business of mortgage market and Giovannini, Alberto Global distribution/sales GlobalOp Financial Services Gluckstern, Steven Goldman Sachs. See also GSAM AIG and Bear Stearns and CDOs of concerns about survival of Convergence Asset Management Global Equity Opportunities Fund hedge funds of LTCM and profits of real estate exposure stock

…

Kenneth GSAM GSE. See Government-sponsored enterprise Gutfruend, John Haghani, Victor Haircuts Hausman, Jerry Hawkins, Gregory Hedge fund gate Hedge funds: average returns of of Bear Stearns function of of Goldman Sachs growth management by GSEs and housing market and lessons from financial crisis of 2008 relative-value High-frequency trader theory

…

Italy, debt burden of Iwanowski, Ray Japanese box trade Japanese swap spread Japanese warrant trade Jittery markets Johnson, James Jones, Bob J.P. Morgan: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and leverage of LTCM and Washington Mutual and JWM Partners, LLC: collapse of deleveraging of Hilibrand and losses at market insanity and

…

as financial pioneer JWM Partners and letter by at LTCM on post-Lehman period at Salomon Brothers on 2008 Merrill Lynch: Bank of America and Bear Stearns and liquidity stress test results real estate exposure Merton, Robert Metallgesellschaft, collapse of Meyer, William MF Global Min, Euoo Sung Modest, David Molinaro, Samuel

…

from financial crisis of 2008 lessons from LTCM crisis Relative-value hedge funds Relative value trades Renaissance Technologies Repo imbalance and Lehman bankruptcy Repo transactions: Bear Stearns and definition of Lehman Brothers and repo swaps of LTCM term repos Reserve Primary Fund (RFP) Reverse repo agreements Risk. See also Risk management

…

Fannie, and liquidity risk market risk measuring of mortgages reduction of prior to quarterly reports systemic risk tail risk Risk arbitrage trades Risk management: at Bear Stearns at JWMP and PGAM at JWM Partners at Lehman Brothers lessons from financial crisis of 2008 Risk management at LTCM: broad outlines as cause of

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

by Michael Lewis  · 1 Nov 2009  · 265pp  · 93,231 words

training class. At some point I couldn't contain myself: I called Meredith Whitney. This was back in March 2008, just before the failure of Bear Stearns, when the outcome still hung in the balance. I thought, If she's right, this really could be the moment when the financial world gets

…

a great idea that they bought B&C mortgage. By early 2005 all the big Wall Street investment banks were deep into the subprime game. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all had what they termed "shelves" for their subprime wares, with strange names like HEAT and SAIL

…

investment bank was effectively run by its bond departments. In most cases--Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers, John Mack at Morgan Stanley, Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns--the CEO was a former bond guy. Ever since the 1980s, when the leading bond firm, Salomon Brothers, had made so much money that it

…

was no point buying insurance from a bank that went out of business the minute the insurance became valuable. He didn't even bother calling Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, as they were more exposed to the mortgage bond market than the other firms. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Bank

…

the models used to evaluate subprime mortgage bonds by the two major rating agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's. The big Wall Street firms--Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and others--had the same goal as any manufacturing business: to pay as little as possible for raw material (

…

What most of these investors had in common was that they had heard, directly or indirectly, Greg Lippmann's argument. In Dallas, Texas, a former Bear Stearns bond salesman named Kyle Bass set up a hedge fund called Hayman Capital in mid-2006 and soon thereafter bought credit default swaps on subprime

…

an office in Manhattan--a floor of the Greenwich Village studio of the artist Julian Schnabel. They'd also moved their account, from Schwab to Bear Stearns. They longed for a relationship with some big Wall Street trading firm and mentioned the desire to their accountant. "He said he knew Ace Greenberg

…

and he could introduce us to him, and so we said great," said Charlie. The former chairman and CEO of Bear Stearns, and a Wall Street legend, Greenberg still kept an office at the firm and acted as a broker for a handful of presumably special investors

…

. When Cornwall Capital moved their assets to Bear Stearns, sure enough, their brokerage statements soon came back with Ace Greenberg's name on top. Like most of what befell them in the financial

…

deal directly with the source of what they viewed as the most underpriced options: the most sophisticated, quantitative trading desks at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, and the rest. The hunting license, they called it. The hunting license had a name: an ISDA. They were the same agreements, dreamed up

…

daily. At the time, Charlie and Jamie and Ben didn't worry much about this provision, or similar provisions in the ISDA they landed with Bear Stearns. They were happy just to be allowed to buy credit default swaps from Greg Lippmann. Now what? They were young men in a hurry--they

…

the subprime mortgage bond market. "A lot of people when we called them said, 'Hey, why don't you guys buy some stocks!'" said Charlie. Bear Stearns couldn't believe that these young guys with no money wanted to buy not just credit default swaps but a credit default swap so esoteric

…

that no one else had bought it. "I remember laughing at them," said the Bear Stearns credit default swap salesman who took their first inquiry. At Deutsche Bank they were passed off to a twenty-three-year-old bond salesman who

…

hence, in Las Vegas. Every big cheese in the subprime mortgage market would be there, with a name tag, and wandering around The Venetian hotel. Bear Stearns was planning a special outing for its customers, at a Vegas firing range, where they could learn to shoot everything from a Glock to an

…

," said Charlie. "I wasn't even allowed to have, like, a toy gun." Off he flew, with Ben, to Las Vegas, to shoot with Bear Stearns, and to see if they could find anyone to explain to them why they were wrong to bet against the subprime mortgage market. CHAPTER SIX

…

said Jamie, "they almost always let you in." The only people Charlie knew in Vegas were a few members of the subprime mortgage machine at Bear Stearns, and he'd never actually met them in person. Nevertheless, they had sent him an e-mail telling him, after he landed in Las Vegas

…

zombie, various hooded al Qaeda terrorists, a young black kid attacking a pretty white woman, an Asian hoodlum waving a pistol. "They put down the Bear Stearns credit card and started buying rounds of ammunition," said Charlie. "And so I started picking my guns." It was the Uzi that made the biggest

…

The Gun Store with both a lingering feeling of having broken some law of nature, and an unanswered question: Why had he been invited? The Bear Stearns guys had been great, but no one had uttered a word about subprime mortgages or CDOs. "It was totally weird, because I'd never

…

trade on we had one week." The trouble, as ever, was finding Wall Street firms willing to deal with them. Their one source of supply, Bear Stearns, suddenly seemed more interested in shooting than in trading with them. Every other firm treated them as a joke. Cornhole Capital. But here, in Las

…

unwilling to take was the risk of dealing directly with Cornwall Capital. It took a while, but Charlie arranged for his Uzi-shooting companions from Bear Stearns to sit in the middle between the two parties, for a fee. The details of a $45 million trade more or less agreed upon in

…

if there were any credit default swaps on CDOs to buy, they were buying it for themselves," said Charlie. At the end of February a Bear Stearns analyst named Gyan Sinha published a long treatise arguing that the recent declines in subprime mortgage bonds had nothing to do with the quality of

…

"market sentiment." Charlie read it thinking that the person who wrote it had no idea what was actually happening in the market. According to the Bear Stearns analyst, double-A CDOs were trading at 75 basis points above the risk-free rate--that is, Charlie should have been able to buy credit

…

"I just needed to calm down from hearing Steve say the world is ending." And everyone laughed. Later that very day, investors in the collapsed Bear Stearns hedge funds were informed that their $1.6 billion in triple-A-rated subprime-backed CDOs had not merely lost some value, they were worthless

…

though at first it was hard to see what it was. On June 14, the pair of subprime mortgage bond hedge funds effectively owned by Bear Stearns went belly-up. In the ensuing two weeks, the publicly traded index of triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds fell by nearly 20 percent. Just

…

turned and made a big bet against the subprime market--further accelerating the balloon's fatal ascent.* When its subprime hedge funds crashed in June, Bear Stearns was forcibly severed from its line--and the balloon drifted farther from the ground. Not long before that, in April 2007, Howie Hubler, perhaps

…

having misgivings about the size of his gamble, had struck a deal with the guy who ran the doomed Bear Stearns hedge funds, Ralph Cioffi. On April 2, the nation's largest subprime mortgage lender, New Century, was swamped by defaults and filed for bankruptcy.

…

length the moment had come: The last buyer of subprime mortgage risk had stopped buying. On August 1, 2007, shareholders brought their first lawsuit against Bear Stearns in connection with the collapse of its subprime-backed hedge funds. Among its less visible effects was to alarm greatly the three young men at

…

Cornwall Capital who sat on what was for them an enormous pile of credit default swaps purchased mostly from Bear Stearns. Ever since Las Vegas, Charlie Ledley had been unable to shake his sense of the enormity of the events they were living through. Ben

…

were collapsing and all the people we'd dealt with were saying we'll give you two points," said Charlie. Right up through late July, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley were saying, in effect, that double-A CDOs were worth 98 cents on the dollar. The argument between Howie Hubler and Greg

…

happened that caused the market to rebound--if, say, the U.S. government stepped in and guaranteed all the subprime mortgages. And of course if Bear Stearns went down, they'd lose it all. Oddly alert to the possibility of catastrophe, they now felt oddly exposed to one. They rushed to cover

…

three Wall Street firms had proved willing to deal with Cornwall Capital and give them the ISDA agreements necessary for dealing in credit default swaps: Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley. "Ben had always told us that it's possible to do a trade without an ISDA, but it was

…

re seeing any prices that reflect anything close to like what they're really worth," said Charlie. "We had positions that were being valued by Bear Stearns at six hundred grand that went to six million the next day." By eleven o clock Thursday night Ben was finished. It was August 9

…

off its hands, neither UBS nor any of their other Wall Street buyers expressed the faintest reservations that they were now assuming the risk that Bear Stearns might fail: That thought, inside big Wall Street firms, was still unthinkable. Cornwall Capital, started four and a half years earlier with $110,000,

…

the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and be paired with a famous investor named Bill Miller--who also happened to own more than $200 million of Bear Stearns stock. Eisman obviously thought it insane that anyone would sink huge sums of money into any Wall Street firm. Greenspan he viewed as almost beneath

…

had called afterward and complained. "Gyan is upset," he said. "Tell him not to be," said Eisman. "We enjoyed it!" At the end of 2007, Bear Stearns had nevertheless invited Eisman to a warm and fuzzy meet and greet with their new CEO, Alan Schwartz. Christmas with Bear, they called it. Schwartz

…

Street banks, plus that of the illustrious former chairman of the Federal Reserve. It was a busy day in the markets--there were rumors that Bear Stearns might be having troubles--but, given a choice between watching the markets and watching Eisman, Danny Moses and Vincent Daniel and Porter Collins didn't

…

. Eisman sat at a long table with the legendary Bill Miller. Miller spoke for maybe three minutes, and explained the wisdom of his investment in Bear Stearns. "And now for our bear," said Mike Mayo. "Steve Eisman." "I got to stand up for this," said Eisman. Miller had given his little

…

from J.P. Morgan. Nine minutes later, as Bill Miller explained why it was such a good idea to own stock in Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz had issued a press release. "Bear Stearns has been the subject of a multitude of rumors concerning our liquidity," it began. Liquidity. When an executive said his bank

…

trade of trivial size that totally contradicted everything they believed. Danny and Vinny both thought the problem in this case was Eisman's affinity for Bear Stearns. The most hated firm on Wall Street, famous mainly for its total indifference to the good opinion of its competitors, Eisman identified with the

…

place! "He'd always say Bear Stearns could never be acquired by anyone because the culture of the firm could never be assimilated into anything else," said Vinny. "I think he saw

…

at home with this totally bizarre long." Whatever the psychological origins of Eisman's sudden urge, the previous afternoon, to buy a few shares in Bear Stearns, Danny was just glad to be done with the matter. Eisman was now explaining why the world was going to blow up, but his partners

…

he spoke a Wall Street investment bank was failing, for a reason other than fraud. And the obvious question was, Why? The collapse of Bear Stearns would later be classified as a run on the bank, and in a sense that was correct--other banks were refusing to do business with

…

Why did the market suddenly distrust a giant Wall Street firm whose permanence it not so very long before took for granted? The demise of Bear Stearns had been so unthinkable in March of 2007 that Cornwall Capital had bought insurance against its collapse for less than three-tenths of 1 percent

…

. They'd put down $300,000 to make $105 million. "Leverage" was Eisman's answer, on this day. To generate profits, Bear Stearns, like every other Wall Street firm, was perching more and more speculative bets on top of each dollar of its capital. But the problem was

…

It had $40 in bets on its subprime mortgage bonds for every dollar of capital it held against those bets. The question wasn't how Bear Stearns could possibly fail but how it could possibly survive. Finishing his little speech and heading back to his chair, Steve Eisman passed Bill Miller and

…

patted him on the back, almost sympathetically. In the brief question-and-answer session that followed, Miller pointed out how unlikely it was that Bear Stearns might fail, because thus far, big Wall Street investment banks had failed only after they were caught in criminal activities. Eisman blurted out, "It'

…

was, like everyone else, punching on his BlackBerry the whole time Miller and Eisman spoke. "Mr. Miller," he said. "From the time you started talking, Bear Stearns stock has fallen more than twenty points. Would you buy more now?" Miller looked stunned. "He clearly had no idea what had happened," said Vinny

…

Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren

…

frowning upon profanity, forcing their male employees to treat women almost as equals, and firing traders for so much as glancing at a lap dancer. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008 more closely resembled normal corporations with solid, Middle American values than did any Wall Street firm circa 1985. The changes

…

Cruz. The version of events offered by people close to Zoe Cruz is that she was worried about the legal risk of doing business with Bear Stearns's troubled hedge funds, and that Hubler never completely explained the risk of triple-A-rated CDOs to her, and led her to believe

…

case was weak, and turned on a couple of e-mails obviously ripped from context. A member of the jury that voted to acquit the Bear Stearns subprime bond traders told Bloomberg News afterward not only that she thought they were innocent as charged but that she would happily invest money with

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World

by William D. Cohan  · 11 Apr 2011  · 1,073pp  · 302,361 words

, leading to the demise or near demise a year or so later of several large Wall Street firms that had been around for generations—including Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch—as well as other large financial institutions such as Citigroup, AIG, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia. Although it underwrote billions of

…

“the big short.” What’s more, the profits Goldman made from “the big short” allowed the firm to put the squeeze on its competitors, including Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, and at least one counterparty, AIG, exacerbating their problems—and fomenting the eventual crisis—because Goldman alone could take the

…

began to be felt in the market. The first victims—of their own poor investment strategy as well as of Goldman’s marks—were two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had invested heavily in squirrelly mortgage-related securities, including many packaged and sold by Goldman Sachs. According to U.S. Securities

…

and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules, the Bear Stearns hedge funds were required to average Goldman’s marks with those provided by traders at other firms. Given the leverage used by the hedge funds

…

dollar—by providing short-term loans to the funds secured by the mortgage securities in the funds. When the funds were liquidated a month later, Bear Stearns took billions of the toxic collateral onto its books, saving its former counterparties from that fate. While becoming the lender to its own hedge funds

…

was an unexpected gift from Bear Stearns to Goldman and others, nine months later Bear Stearns was all but bankrupt, its creditors rescued only by the Federal Reserve and by a merger agreement with JPMorgan Chase. Bear

…

itself in 2004 from an insurer of municipal bonds to a big investor in risky CDOs after getting a $115 million equity infusion from a Bear Stearns private-equity fund, which became ACA’s largest investor. Furthermore, documents show that Paolo Pellegrini, John Paulson’s partner, and Laura Schwartz, a managing

…

capital—$11.4 million—followed by Wertheim & Co., with $10.6 million, and Loeb, Rhoades, with $10.3 million. Lehman Brothers had $9.9 million; Bear Stearns had $6.9 million, just above Goldman. After Goldman on the list was Lazard Frères & Co., with $6.447 million. Morgan Stanley, twenty-sixth on

…

interests, whether playing golf or bridge, supporting Jewish philanthropic causes around New York City, or making money through arbitrage. Cy Lewis’s big break at Bear Stearns came after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the United States decided the time had come to enter World War II. “The war came and

…

thought the firm had missed an arbitrage opportunity or a block trade, which was a business that Lewis and Levy had pioneered, whereby Goldman or Bear Stearns would buy large blocks of stock—as principals—from the selling institutions, with the intention of breaking them up and selling them off to other

…

and the laws of self-fulfilling prophecies took over. Late in the day on September 10, the assets that LTCM had “in the box” at Bear Stearns, its clearing agent, fell below $500 million for the first time, triggering a provision in the agreement LTCM had with Bear. Warren Spector, the co

…

the phone with Thain, and he was increasingly angry that Goldman would have to pony up, first $250 million, and then $300 million (chiefly because Bear Stearns had declined to participate at all). With the basic agreement finally in place, the lawyers drafted up the paperwork over the next five days, trying

…

and when you refuse to be a good citizen and help somebody else, then people remember that.” Of course, Goldman’s subsequent role in exacerbating Bear Stearns’s spectacular demise in March 2008 has been much debated, with some linking it to lingering anger over Cayne’s decision not to participate in

…

in the league tables—underwriting 204 deals globally, worth $130.7 billion—but still was far behind Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns. These other firms were coining money underwriting mortgage-backed securities and became so concerned about having access to a steady flow of mortgages to package

…

thinking had he had some involvement with mortgage securities before he had become a hedge-fund manager, rather than a mediocre M&A banker at Bear Stearns. But, he conceded, the fact that Paulson was an outsider and had very little direct experience in mortgages turned out to be the key

…

Goldman [and two unnamed others], they are buying large amounts of corporate CDS protection (on the broker dealer reference entities)”—or insurance in case say Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, or Goldman were to default on their debt—“to hedge their counterparty credit risk!!!” This was quite a revelation in that Paulson—in

…

replied to this news. “Absolutely amazing.” An hour later, Tourre elaborated with more news, this time about the risks Paulson perceived about doing business with Bear Stearns, where Paulson once worked. “The meeting itself was surreal,” he continued. “Am hearing that Paulson bought $2bn of [redacted] CDS protection, sucking all the liquidity

…

made an additional bundle betting his old firm would collapse. At the end of December 2006, the cost of buying insurance against a default on Bear Stearns debt was 0.18 cents per dollar of protection. Since Paulson had bought $2 billion worth of protection, his cost would have been $3.

…

6 million. During the week before JPMorgan Chase bought Bear Stearns, on March 16, 2008, and saved its debt from defaulting, the cost of buying that insurance had skyrocketed to 7.5 cents per dollar of

…

risk of default had evaporated with the merger agreement—Paulson would have pocketed tens of millions. Within months, Goldman had mimicked Paulson’s bet that Bear Stearns would collapse. —— TOURRE HAD FOUND a firm—ACA Management, LLC—and a senior managing director there, Laura Schwartz, to help to choose the securities that

…

-third CDO sponsored by ACA and the fifth “synthetic” using residential mortgage-backed securities. ACA’s main business had been insuring municipal bonds, but after Bear Stearns Merchant Banking invested $115 million in the company, in September 2004, for a 28 percent stake, ACA replaced its longtime management and began to get

…

disagreed with Goldman’s decision to get short the mortgage market. For instance, the next day—February 12—Gyan Sinha, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns in charge of the firm’s market research regarding asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, held a conference call for some nine hundred investors

…

be a spectacular collapse of the market for mortgages and mortgage-backed securities? Major proponents of the glass-is-half-full thinking were the two Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin. Apparently unbeknownst to many of their investors who thought Cioffi and Tannin had invested in less risky

…

securities, the two Bear Stearns hedge funds—which together had around $1.5 billion of investor money riding—were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, including the synthetic CDOs Goldman

…

-equity loans, as well as more complicated CDOs and synthetic CDOs. This activity continued throughout the first half of 2007 until the collapse of the Bear Stearns hedge funds in the early summer of 2007 made that activity nearly impossible. Goldman continued to generate fees underwriting and selling mortgage-related securities at

…

directors in September 2007, Goldman had underwritten $4.4 billion of subprime mortgage-related securities to date, seventh in the league tables, just ahead of Bear Stearns. In CDOs, Goldman put together twelve deals in 2007, totaling $8.4 billion, fourth overall but light-years behind Merrill Lynch, which underwrote $72.

…

steep losses, assuming buyers could be found at all. Of course by the fall of 2007—some three months after the liquidation of the two Bear Stearns hedge funds—there would be no practical way to avoid discussing in such a document the ongoing meltdown in the mortgage securities market. Goldman and

…

House Appropriations subcommittee: “From the standpoint of the overall economy, my bottom line is we’re watching it closely but it appears to be contained.” Bear Stearns was also projecting a very different outlook on the opportunities in the mortgage market than was Goldman. In a March 29 “Investor Day” presentation, Jeffrey

…

securities and asset-backed securities; the firm had expanded its mortgage origination capabilities by purchasing Encore Credit Corporation—a “sub-prime wholesale originator”—to complement Bear Stearns Residential Mortgage Corporation and EMC Mortgage Corporation; and Bear ranked fifth in the underwriting of CDOs, with a volume of $23 billion in 2006, with

…

ride for Fabrice Tourre. One way the Timberwolf deal got done, according to an internal Goldman memorandum, was because the two hedge-fund managers at Bear Stearns Asset Management, Cioffi and Tannin, bought $400 million worth of the $600 million security—by far the largest chunk—at prices that ranged from just

…

$900 million synthetic CDO squared known as ABACUS 2006 HGS1—a different ABACUS deal than the famous one Tourre worked on—expressly for the two Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers. The security referenced a mix of credit-default swaps on A-rated bonds and synthetic asset-backed securities, “the sweet spot

…

15 cents on the dollar, Goldman trader Matthew Bieber referred to March 27 as “a day that will live in infamy.” Meanwhile one of the Bear Stearns hedge-fund investors, who lost all that he had invested, observed, tongue firmly implanted in his cheek: “Nice trade, Ralph.” (According to Michael Lewis,

…

go, ‘But, but, but, but, but …’ ” After the decision to send out the revised, significantly lower NAV, Cioffi e-mailed John Geissinger, one of his Bear Stearns colleagues: “There is no market. Don’t know what more to say about it at this time[.] [I]ts [sic] all academic anyway[.] 19% is

…

The marks had had their devastating impact. “Bear is the canary in the mine shaft at this time,” Bill Jamison, of Federated Investors (one of Bear Stearns’s largest short-term lenders), wrote in a June 21 e-mail. In an interview, Gary Cohn, Goldman’s president, said the market changed dramatically

…

crisis that began in 2007, to refute the suggestion that Goldman’s decision in 2007 to lower its marks exacerbated the problems at the two Bear Stearns hedge funds. In Broeckel’s letter, she challenged “the assertions” that Goldman’s lower marks “were in some way responsible for the ultimate failure

…

lenders, including Goldman and many others, by taking them out at 100 cents on the dollar—a decision that ultimately led to the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. Broeckel’s letter did not mention—or include—Craig Broderick’s fateful May 11 e-mail about Goldman’s decision to lower

…

these securities widened to the point where there needed to be such an extensive debate about their value was the beginning of the end for Bear Stearns. For its part, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded: “Broderick was right about the impact of Goldman’s marks on clients and counterparties.” The

…

lenders, including Goldman Sachs, whereby Goldman would take back its collateral and then attempt to sell it in the market. As part of the deal Bear Stearns reached with many of the lenders, Goldman would be made whole with either cash or securities. Among the collateral that Goldman took back was $300

…

used to bash Goldman for eleven hours at the end of April 2010. A week later, the Timberwolf securities still had not sold. The two Bear Stearns hedge funds were officially liquidated on July 30. Investors in the funds lost around $1.5 billion. Since Bear had become the short-term lender

…

to the funds on June 22—replacing Goldman, among others—when the funds were liquidated, Bear Stearns seized $1.3 billion of underlying collateral, which it eventually wrote down in the fourth quarter of 2007, leading to the first quarterly loss in

…

, his put options had made a profit of $49 million since he had bought them. Among those companies whose stock he bet would fall were Bear Stearns, Moody’s, Washington Mutual, Capital One Financial, and National City. It is not clear from the note when Birnbaum started buying the puts, but

…

“to opportunistically buy puts” on those companies with exposure to the mortgage market. He cited specifically thirteen companies he wanted to buy puts for, including Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Countrywide. Donald Mullen, then head of Goldman’s U.S. credit sales and trading, having joined Goldman from

…

of the short sale would seem to confirm the view that Goldman is the nimblest, and perhaps smartest, brokerage on Wall Street.” He noted that Bear Stearns’s “mortgage business suffered considerably in the quarter” and Morgan Stanley “wasn’t as well hedged to bond losses” (in fact, according to Michael

…

actively engaged in the business flows and decision-making process, in times of calm as well as crisis.” CHAPTER 23 GOLDMAN GETS PAID Not only Bear Stearns but also AIG, the international insurance behemoth, began to feel the effects of the aggressive way Goldman was marking its trading books. Which is not

…

others at ground zero of capitalism. In the aftermath of the global financial collapse, one of the reasons given for the historic decisions to rescue Bear Stearns and AIG was because of how “interconnected” these institutions were to one another, according to Robert Steel, the former Goldman partner who had joined

…

Treasury as undersecretary for domestic finance. Goldman’s marks were one of the ways firms became linked to one another. The consequences for the two Bear Stearns hedge funds—which likely would have collapsed anyway—were devastating and were exacerbated by Goldman’s marks; at AIG, the Goldman marks were equally momentous

…

lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and Tourre. 2. “Definitely some people were shocked”: Author interview with Josh Birnbaum. Much of the account of the collapse of Bear Stearns’s two hedge funds in 2007 comes from William D. Cohan, House of Cards (New York: Doubleday & Co., 2009). 3. “Ben shared my concerns”:

…

and mortgage-backed securities of, 18.1, 21.1, 21.2, 22.1, 22.2 private-equity fund of Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM), 21.1, 21.2, 22.1, 22.2 Bear Stearns Merchant Banking Bear Stearns Residential Mortgage Corporation Beatrice Foods, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6, 15

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

by James Rickards  · 15 Nov 2016  · 354pp  · 105,322 words

-seven separate banks in 1990, and were still nineteen separate banks in 2000. JPMorgan is a perfect example, having absorbed the assets of Chase Manhattan, Bear Stearns, Chemical Bank, First Chicago, Bank One, and Washington Mutual, among other predecessors. What was too big to fail in 2008 is bigger today. Depositor savings

…

Fisher led the emergency response by the Fed; he later became vice chairman of mega–wealth manager BlackRock. The bridge-playing Jimmy Cayne, head of Bear Stearns, was LTCM’s broker. He had the best information of any outsider on LTCM’s market risks. In typical Wall Street style, Cayne refused to

…

in takeover deals is expensive because of commissions and margin interest on short positions. LTCM used an equity basket swap arranged by its prime broker, Bear Stearns. In an equity basket swap, a limit is placed on the basket’s size. In the case of the LTCM

…

swap, the basket held $15 billion in equities. LTCM put items in the basket or took them out with a phone call to the Bear Stearns swap desk. The swap gave LTCM the same profit or loss as owning actual shares without the expense or capital requirements of ownership. Old-school

…

-Boeing, MCI-WorldCom, and Citicorp-Travelers. LTCM put long and short stock picks in the swap basket, then Bear Stearns did real stock trades to cover its basket exposure. LTCM and Bear Stearns were both hedged. Bear Stearns got cheap financing because it was a dealer. LTCM got cheap financing because it used an off-balance

…

idea you would shut down stock markets too.” He was reacting to the $15 billion in takeover deal stocks on our books. If LTCM defaulted, Bear Stearns’s hedged stock positions would instantaneously become net long, as the short to LTCM would disappear. Bear would then dump $15 billion in stocks into

…

morning, September 21, with the heads of JPMorgan, Goldman, Citibank, and Merrill Lynch. The group knew that when LTCM failed, the same disappearing hedge that Bear Stearns faced would emerge at every big bank in every market in the world. This is how net risk in calm markets morphs into gross risk

…

, I should have known better than to underestimate greed on Wall Street. My phone rang—it was Warren Spector, one of the top officials at Bear Stearns. He wasted no time. “We’re going to put you into default. I’m on my way to the Fed to tell them. We’re

…

was to target his wealth; Bear’s stock would suffer if our lawsuit succeeded. Personal wealth is the only language Wall Street understands. Spector blinked. Bear Stearns did not call a default, but it refused to join the Consortium. This was not forgotten on Wall Street. Ten years later when

…

Bear Stearns failed, no tears were shed. As far as Wall Street was concerned, Bear’s 2008 collapse was payback for its 1998 stab in the back.

…

’ wish lists. Bankers own Washington. Pressure to ease up on broker-dealer capital requirements was coming not just from banks, but from brokers such as Bear Stearns and Lehman not owned by banks. They wanted a level playing field so they could compete with banks in the securities business. Simultaneously, banks wanted

…

reaction that began over a year earlier, the week of July 16, 2007. Two hedge funds sponsored by Bear Stearns that specialized in leveraged bets on debt derivatives collapsed into insolvency that week. Bear Stearns tried to organize a self-rescue, but this failed. Counterparties like Merrill Lynch seized collateral that proved illiquid and

…

redemptions on three funds that invested in subprime mortgage assets. At the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on June 28, 2007, just prior to the Bear Stearns fund meltdown, Ben Bernanke and the FOMC said, “The economy seems likely to continue to expand at a moderate pace over coming quarters.” Shortly before

…

repeated this pattern almost ten years to the day. In March 2008, the crisis became visible again with Bear Stearns’s collapse over the course of a few days, March 12 to 16. On Wednesday, March 12, Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz told CNBC, “We have no problems with our liquidity and overnight funding

…

. … Bear Stearns’s balance sheet, liquidity and capital remain strong … and the situation, with time, will stabilize.” Three days later, Bear

…

Fund bailouts and new Fed lending facilities. Jan–Feb 08 were then calm. We had a panic in Mar 08 which was mitigated by the Bear Stearns bailout and further Fed facilities. Apr–Jun were then calm. We had a panic in Jul 08 which was mitigated by the Fannie/Freddie housing

…

17, 1998, when Russia devalued the ruble and defaulted on its debt, leading to the LTCM collapse. The fourth was June 20, 2007, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed after a failed rescue attempt leading to the Lehman crisis the following year. Capital markets are in what physicists call a supercritical

…

: Henry Blodget, “Did Bear Sterns CEO Alan Schwartz Lie on CNBC?,” Business Insider, March 19, 2008, accessed August 8, 2016, www.businessinsider.com/2008/3/bear-stearns-bsc-did-ceo-alan-schwartz-lie-on-cnbc-. The advice was sent as an email: The original email text of this written proposal is retained

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

by Satyajit Das  · 14 Oct 2011  · 741pp  · 179,454 words

Fall of RJR Nabisco. In 2006 and 2007, larger LBOs were completed although, after adjustment for inflation, none surpassed RJR Nabisco. While at investment bank Bear Stearns, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. and his protégés Henry Kravis and George Roberts, a cousin of Kravis, purchased businesses for financial buyers using large amounts of debt

…

. After strategic disagreements, the three left Bear Stearns, creating KKR in 1976. LBOs were not new. After the Second World War there were bootstrap acquisitions where financial buyers bought businesses, using the acquired

…

cutters, would be retained. Many private equity deals did not live up to expectations. Blackstone paid $26 billion for Hilton Hotels, financed by Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and others. Financiers spent a lot of time in hotels and somehow assumed that this qualified them to own and run them. As recession hit

…

Merrill Lynch, announced that “the ship will sail closer to shore.”6 Rubin was fired but went on to a successful career at Bear Stearns. Ace Greenberg, the head of Bear Stearns, believed in “second chances” and thought Rubin “can make a real contribution.” Merrill tended to be in the thick of trouble and

…

to finance the securities it holds. Hedge funds bought ABSs, funded by borrowing (up to) 98 percent of the value of AAA-rated assets. At Bear Stearns, Ralph Cioffi, a bond salesman, set up the High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund and High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. Promising clients

…

Sachs, Bank of America, and JP Morgan. The fees (2 percent of assets under management and 20 percent of profits) accounted for three-quarters of Bear Stearns Asset Management revenues in 2004 and 2005. Existing securitized debt was purchased by another SPV and then repackaged into new securitized debt. These were re

…

was an educated guess, then the correlation input into a structured finance CDO, CDO2, or CDO3 was fantasy. In the 2006 financial statements for the Bear Stearns hedge funds, auditors Deloitte & Touche noted that between 60 and 70 percent of assets were valued using estimates provided by the fund’s managers, cautioning

…

the day that Timberwolf was issued as “a day that will live in infamy.” Like Abacus, within 5 months of issuance, Timberwolf, whose investors included Bear Stearns’ hedge funds, lost 80 percent of its value.10 During a Senate hearing, Goldman’s CFO David Viniar was asked: “when you heard that your

…

not have the money to meet the margin calls. Forced selling set off of a new round of price falls, restarting the entire cycle. At Bear Stearns, Ralphie’s Funds owned AAA and AA-rated MBSs funded by $600 million in equity and $10 billion in short-term borrowings. In good times

…

all equity investors. A 24 percent fall in the value of the underlying bonds translated into a $1.8 billion loss for the lending banks. Bear Stearns agreed, under pressure, to provide a $1.6 billion loan (over 10 percent of the firm’s equity) to the less leveraged High Grade Structured

…

Credit Fund, letting its more leveraged sibling fail. Jimmy Cayne, cigar-smoking, bridge-playing, and (allegedly) pot-smoking Bear Stearns’ CEO, sought a one-year moratorium on margin calls. In 1998, when Wall Street bailed out Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), Bear famously rejected a

…

, the UK hedge fund Peleton Partners (the name refers to the leading group in a bicycle road race) failed. Following a similar strategy to the Bear Stearns funds, Peleton had recently won an industry award for best new fixed-income hedge fund. Phase Transition Banks with mortgage assets suffered large losses because

…

, Tudor Jones, and James Simons, an ex-mathematics professor and former code breaker, have outstanding records. For others, investment Viagra boosted performance. Some, like the Bear Stearns hedge funds, used leverage to increase returns. In 2009, in a Freudian slip, George Soros referred to Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) as “leveraged capital

…

fund is offering you the opportunity to invest on special terms related to LTCM’s fees.”29 There were no takers. On September 18, 1998 Bear Stearns was rumored to have frozen the fund’s cash account, following a large margin call. On September 23, 1998 AIG, Goldman Sachs, and Warren Buffet

…

from a place where it was observable to places where it was hidden and unregulated. Trading linked market participants in networks of relationships and interdependence. Bear Stearns was linked to 5,000 parties via 750,000 contracts. Lehman Brothers had more than a 1 million contracts with a notional value of $40

…

the wealth of senior executives, because they were significant shareholders of their banks. While executives suffered losses, top executives of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had cashed out. The top five executives at Bear Stearns and Lehman pocketed cash bonuses exceeding $300 million and $150 million respectively (in 2009 U.S. dollars). Although the

…

comes when you discover that you got $1 million but someone else got a dollar more. Plenty Successful bankers, like Lehman’s Richard Fuld and Bear Stearns’ James Cayne, took nearly 2 decades to become multimillionaires and finally billionaires. A less patient, new generation aspired to become hedge fund and private equity

…

rise of markets. The failure of For the Love of God to sell marked its zenith as clearly as any economic marker. In July 2007, Bear Stearns injected $1.6 billion into one of its hedge funds. On 7, August 2007, on the brink of collapse due to investments in mortgage-backed

…

the run on Northern Rock forced the UK government to guarantee all existing bank deposits to stop the run. In March 2008, JP Morgan purchased Bear Stearns for a price lower than that paid by the LA Galaxy for the footballer David Beckham. In September 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were

…

: “We can’t do anything in the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.”51 After the Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were found not guilty of all charges, a member of the jury said that not only was Ralph Cioffi innocent but that

…

. 23. David Wighton, Ben White and Deborah Brewster “Citadel trading costs hit $5.5 bn” (2–3 December 2006) Financial Times: 1. 24. Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Paine Webber senior executives are understood to have had invested in LTCM; see Roger Lowenstein (2002) When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of

…

basis risk, 213 Bass, Robert M., 137 Bateman, Patrick, 313 Baum, L. Frank, 26 Bauman, Zegmunt, 44, 312 Beach Boys, The, 157 Bean, Charles, 50 Bear Stearns, 162, 191, 204, 249, 316, 318, 326, 338 Asset Management, 191 Beasley, Jane, 62 Beat the Market, 121 Beatles, The, 157, 166 Beatrice, 141 Beckham

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history

by Gregory Zuckerman  · 3 Nov 2009  · 342pp  · 99,390 words

levels. Real estate was the talk of every cocktail party, soccer match, and family barbecue. Financial behemoths such as Citigroup and AIG, New Century and Bear Stearns, were scoring big profits. The economy was roaring. Everyone seemed to be making money hand over fist. Everyone but John Paulson, that is. To

…

offered him entry-level positions, where he would join the most recent business school graduates, but it was something he resisted. An opportunity at Bear Stearns suited him much better. The firm was just below the upper echelon of the investment banking business, and it didn’'t have extensive databases or

…

firm was hoping to win business from the same financial entrepreneurs that Paulson was so enamored with and saw him as an obvious match. Joining Bear Stearns in 1984, Paulson, now twenty-eight, quickly climbed the ranks, working as many as one hundred hours per week on merger-and-acquisition deals.

…

were furnished in surprisingly pedestrian ways, with odd, plastic trees or ragged furniture. One of his apartments was located above a discount-shoe store. At Bear Stearns, Paulson regaled younger colleagues with self-deprecating stories of dates that went awry, an appealing contrast to other bankers who took themselves far too seriously

…

and was uncomfortable cozying up to the firm’'s partners, who determined annual bonuses. In one deal, Paulson helped score a $36 million profit for Bear Stearns after the bank, along with an investment firm called Gruss & Co., made a $679 million buyout offer for Anderson Clayton Company, a food and

…

insurance conglomerate. The $36 million score was a drop in the bucket at Bear Stearns, where it was divided among hundreds of partners. But Paulson noticed that Gruss, which hadn’'t previously undertaken a buyout, divided the same $36

…

this point, the firm consisted of just Paulson and an assistant; it was located in a tiny office in a Park Avenue building owned by Bear Stearns and shared by other small hedge-fund clients of the investment bank. Paulson continued to woo investors, paying to speak at industry conferences and

…

criticized his attractive new assistant, Jenny Zaharia, a recent immigrant from Romania who had landed a job at the firm after delivering lunch from the Bear Stearns cafeteria to Paulson and his employees. A college student in Romania, Zaharia left her family behind and was granted political asylum in the United

…

be acquired when he deduced that their merger agreements might collapse, a step most competitors were uncomfortable taking. And because Paulson had crafted mergers at Bear Stearns, he felt at ease taking big positions in stocks he was most certain would be acquired or receive competing acquisition offers, rather than simply

…

because students complained it was just too hard, Kohlberg says. During his first summer in business school, Pellegrini worked at the investment-banking department at Bear Stearns, sharing an office with John Paulson, impressing him by developing a detailed, proprietary database of merger deals. At Harvard, Pellegrini felt uncomfortable socializing with

…

kinds of questions in others’' minds. Pellegrini still had big ideas, however. He started an insurance company in Bermuda with Bill Michaelcheck, a former Bear Stearns colleague, to invest insurance premiums in hedge funds. He threw himself into developing complicated models. The idea was a success for Michaelcheck, who turned it

…

’'t have to be created to satisfy hungry investors; rather, a “"synthetic”" mortgage could be sold to them. In February, Lippmann called traders from Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and a few other firms struggling with the same issues, inviting them, along with a battalion of lawyers, to a conference room at

…

to pay Burry his money. As a result, Burry began to avoid doing business with investment firms with big mortgage holdings, like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. He focused his trades on other brokerage firms. By the late summer of 2005, however, Burry realized that the first batch of insurance that

…

Pellegrini only recently had learned of the complex details of the mortgage market, thanks to a series of tutorials from the firm’'s brokers at Bear Stearns and contacts at other firms, and after attending an industry conference. The lessons were brief, and he still wasn’'t sure about many details

…

Paulson’'s team realized, and Paulson a rank outsider. Was there something he was missing? Paulson wondered. “"Our models say don’'t be worried,”" said Bear Stearns’' Gyan Sinha, a top-rated analyst, on a phone call. “"Home prices have never gone negative,”" another analyst said. Others emphasized that investment-grade mortgage

…

their bearish ideas, noting that home prices already seemed to have plateaued, without the kinds of losses Pellegrini’'s data predicted. Some of them, like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley, were anxious to increase their exposure to subprime mortgages and didn’'t seem to appreciate Paulson’'s

…

investors.5 “"Never before have home owners been so leveraged; and never before has the residential market been so speculative,”" said Françcois Trahan, a Bear Stearns strategist, in May 2005. Around the same time, a popular video made the rounds putting the housing market on a virtual roller-coaster ride that

…

had reached. Even those betting on the housing market seemed to hedge themselves. By late 2005, Ralph Cioffi, who operated two big hedge funds at Bear Stearns and appeared to have an insatiable appetite for mortgage products, was steering clear of the riskiest subprime mortgage investments. Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide,

…

place more bets against the ABX. “"Really??”" Birnbaum responded, apparently surprised that he hadn’'t persuaded them to stop. Paulson invited mortgage experts from Bear Stearns to challenge his team to make sure they weren’'t missing anything. The group walked into the “"Park”" conference room, next to Pellegrini’'s office

…

showroom with a long runway where female models sometimes gathered, wearing revealing Christian Dior swimsuits. This afternoon there was less to stare at. The Bear Stearns team, among the most bullish on Wall Street, began by saying that subprime-mortgage losses of more than 3 percent were highly unlikely and that

…

of the executives didn’'t fully believe their own arguments. They simply were aiming to stop Paulson from shorting so much and causing trouble for Bear Stearns, Pellegrini concluded. He quietly seethed. Two could play this game, Pellegrini eventually decided. He started to act as if he was having second thoughts

…

selling CDOs to pension funds, insurance companies, and other investors. Back in the United States, they pitched hedge-fund investors such as Ralph Cioffi of Bear Stearns on the manicured lawns of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club in Westchester, New York, the ski slopes of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and elsewhere. For each

…

Moss, a sixty-seven-year-old real estate developer from Cleveland, Tennessee, who invested about $1 million in one of Cioffi’'s funds at Bear Stearns. It seemed like investors hungered for these CDO slices because housing was rising. But in reality, many were taking advantage of a slick accounting maneuver

…

ways to expand their wager against risky mortgages; accumulating it in the market sometimes proved a slow process. So they made appointments with bankers at Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and other firms to ask if they would create CDOs that Paulson & Co. could essentially bet against. Paulson’'s team

…

the deals”" to investors, without telling them that a bearish hedge fund was the impetus for the transaction, Eichel told a colleague; on the other, Bear Stearns would be helping Paulson wager against the deals. “"We had three meetings with John, we were working on a trade together,”" says Eichel. “"He

…

By late 2006, Wall Street firms were squeezing every last drop from the housing market. After hemming and hawing, his contacts at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns agreed to sell him CDS contracts, as long as the paperwork was approved by their superiors. But they insisted that their credit departments approve Lahde

…

can just buy mortgages out of a pool, so you guys never will be able to collect”" on the insurance contracts. It turned out that Bear Stearns owned a “"servicing”" company called EMC Mortgage Corp. that collected the monthly loan payments of home owners. If EMC exchanged poorly performing home loans

…

s insurance worthless. Later at the conference, another bearish investor, Kyle Bass, shared with Pellegrini a similarly ominous comment that he said he had overheard Bear Stearns’' head mortgage trader, Scott Eichel, make in a crowded bar. Eichel later denied boasting of any such maneuver, saying he was simply warning bearish investors

…

these complex market instruments, and the group never addressed Pellegrini’'s concerns. Back in New York, as Rosenberg finished another purchase of mortgage protection, a Bear Stearns trader added an unusual comment: “"There’'s a document we want to send you.”" Uh-oh, that can’'t be good, Rosenberg thought. Reading

…

it carefully at the fax machine, Rosenberg saw that Bear Stearns was reserving the right to work with EMC to adjust mortgages. Rosenberg immediately showed the document to Pellegrini. Unnerved, he and Rosenberg got on the

…

Greg Lippmann and Kyle Bass, and then hired former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt to spread the word about the alleged threat from Bear Stearns. He and Waldorf held a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, arguing that EMC could modify all the mortgages it wished

…

switch mortgages just to keep a pool of sub-prime loans from running into problems. Pitt and Waldorf seemed to cause enough of a fuss: Bear Stearns soon withdrew its proposal. Paulson had avoided catastrophe. But he was having other difficulties. Each time Rosenberg called a trader to buy protection on

…

’'t nearly as healthy as they seemed. TWO BIG HEDGE FUNDS operated by Ralph Cioffi soon provided Paulson with more reasons to be suspicious of Bear Stearns’' health. Cioffi’'s funds, which held about $2 billion in capital but borrowed so much money that they owned nearly $20 billion of mortgage

…

week in Nashville, Tennessee, competing in a bridge tournament, seemingly confident that Cioffi’'s funds wouldn’'t have much of an impact on Bear Stearns.4 Soon, though, lenders forced Bear Stearns to extend one of the hedge funds’' portfolios $1.6 billion to keep it afloat. A huge red flag had been raised

…

, warning investors to Bear Stearns’' own problems. By July, the Bear Stearns funds had collapsed, leading to billions of dollars of losses for clients and throwing financial markets into chaos. Investors suddenly shunned mortgages. Brokerage

…

other brokers, quickly spreading word about what Lippmann was advocating around Wall Street. He soon received a phone call from Scott Eichel, his counterpart at Bear Stearns. “"Why are you telling people that things are going to blow up?”" Eichel asked him. “"Why are you so sure?”" Eichel argued that the

…

billions of additional bonds would see their ratings slashed. S&P also dropped its ratings on $12 billion of debt issued by Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, bond-market powerhouses. Both firms now faced ratings that were close to “"junk”" level. Moody’'s, the other big rating company, reduced its own

…

about $2 billion of profits owning protection that Paulson had discarded. It was a valiant effort to save their firm. Tension was building elsewhere within Bear Stearns, as executives argued about how to right their sinking ship. The investment bank held too many risky mortgages, and clients, including major hedge funds,

…

. He provided details about how he and his team were shifting to wager against financial companies while trimming their protection against subprime mortgages. Paulson named Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and bond insurer Ambac Financial group and credit-ratings company Moody’'s Corp. as those in hot water, a suggestion to

…

how Bear had improved its financial position, why its business was healthy, and how much cash the firm held. The press had it out for Bear Stearns, Molinaro emphasized. There really was nothing terribly wrong with the firm. Then another Bear executive gave a speech, saying that he couldn’'t share

…

of need. Listening to it all, some of the hedgies began to feel pangs of guilt, remembering times they indeed had been aided by various Bear Stearns executives. For another twenty minutes, Molinaro easily handled softball questions from the group. It seemed he was winning them over and a crucial victory

…

was within sight. Maybe Bear Stearns could save itself after all. Then John Paulson raised a hand. The executives turned to watch him, eager to hear what he might say.

…

thousand employees?”" Mintz demanded, getting in Schwartz’'s face. “"Look in my eyes, and tell me how this happened!”"1 On the Sunday that Bear Stearns fought for its life, and while others on Wall Street were glued to their computers, worrying about the impact, Paulson watched his two daughters frolic

…

and the executives running financial firms that collapsed so suddenly, 2008 was about recrimination. One Thursday morning in June 2008, the two executives who ran Bear Stearns’' hedge funds that made wrong-way bets on CDOs and other mortgage investments, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, were hauled into a Brooklyn jail cell

…

office. “"Dude, is Bear really at seven hundred?!”" he asked Rich Eckert, his chief financial officer. Credit-default swap contracts protecting the debt of Bear Stearns indeed were trading at 7 percentage points above the rate that top-rated banks lent to each other. Lahde instantly understood that the market had

…

June 13, 2007. 3. Vikas Bajai, “"Prospering in an Implosion,”" New York Times, April 12, 2007. 4. Kate Kelly, “"The Fall of Bear Stearns: Lost Opportunities Haunt Final Days of Bear Stearns—--Executives Bickered Over Raising Cash, Cutting Mortgages,”" The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2008. Chapter 121. James R. Hagerty and Ken Gepfert

…

How Blackstone’'s Chief Became $7 Billion Man,”" The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2007. Chapter 141. Kate Kelly, “"The Fall of Bear Stearns: Lost Opportunities Haunt Final Days of Bear Stearns—--Executives Bickered Over Raising Cash, Cutting Mortgages,”" The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2008. 2. Carrick Mollenkamp, Susanne Craig, Jeffrey McCracken, and

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves

by Andrew Ross Sorkin  · 15 Oct 2009  · 351pp  · 102,379 words

before Congress’s Joint Economic Committee in March 2007. By August 2007, however, the $2 trillion subprime market had collapsed, unleashing a global contagion. Two Bear Stearns hedge funds that made major subprime bets failed, losing $1.6 billion of their investors’ money. BNP Paribas, France’s largest listed bank, briefly suspended

…

out exactly what these assets are worth.) Without a price the market was paralyzed. And without access to capital, Wall Street simply could not function. Bear Stearns, the weakest and most highly leveraged of the Big Five, was the first to fall. But everyone knew that even the strongest of banks could

…

the handful of people who controlled the economy’s fate—during the critical months after Monday, March 17, 2008, when JP Morgan agreed to absorb Bear Stearns and when United States government officials eventually determined that it was necessary to undertake the largest public intervention in the nation’s economic history. For

…

flight back, Fuld had thought about buying Bear himself. Should he? Could he? No, the situation was far too surreal. JP Morgan’s deal for Bear Stearns was, he recognized, a lifesaver for the banking industry—and himself. Washington, he thought, was smart to have played matchmaker; the market couldn’t have

…

paper, and the market hadn’t even opened. On CNBC, Joe Kernen was interviewing Anton Schutz of Burnham Asset Management about the fallout from the Bear Stearns deal and what it meant for Lehman. “We’ve been characterizing Lehman Brothers as the front, or ground zero, for what’s happening today,”

…

Group Holdings, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, had circulated an internal memo late the previous week ordering its traders to avoid new transactions involving Bear Stearns and Lehman. Paulson was concerned that Lehman might be losing trading partners, which would be the beginning of the end. “We’re going to

…

the latest rumor swirling around the trading floor: A bunch of “hedgies,” Wall Street’s disparaging nickname for hedge fund managers, had systematically taken down Bear Stearns by pulling their brokerage accounts, buying insurance against the bank—an instrument called a credit default swap, or CDS—and then shorting its stock. According

…

New York, told Bloomberg Television. Richard Bernstein, the respected chief investment strategist for Merrill Lynch, had sent out an alarming note to clients that morning: “Bear Stearns’s demise should probably be viewed as the first of many,” he wrote, tactfully not mentioning Lehman. “Sentiment is just beginning to catch on as

…

market fears, a great deal was still riding on her performance. Surely everyone listening in would ask the same questions: How was Lehman different from Bear Stearns? How strong was its liquidity position? How was it valuing its real estate portfolio? Could investors really believe Lehman’s “marks” (the way the

…

“I’m getting it from all sides,” he confided. To make matters worse, it was a presidential election year. On Monday, a day after the Bear Stearns deal was announced, Democratic candidate Senator Hillary Clinton, who at the time had a slight lead in national polls, criticized the bailout, going so far

…

it clear that the administration would have to confront at least one serious problem: the subprime mortgage mess, which had already begun to have repercussions. Bear Stearns and others were deeply involved in this business, and he needed to find a way to obtain “wind down authorities” over these troubled broker-dealers

…

failing banks safely into receivership and auction them off. But the FDIC had no authority over investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, and unless Paulson was given comparable power over these institutions, he said during the meeting, there could be chaos in the market

…

its resident policy-making brain. A Republican and free-market champion, Nason had been warning at these meetings for months about the possibility of another Bear Stearns–like run on one or more banks. He and other Treasury officials had come to recognize that Wall Street’s broker-dealer model—in which

…

Persian Gulf. But it clearly wasn’t enough, and the banks had already been forced to tap the investors with the deepest pockets. With the Bear Stearns situation seemingly behind them, Paulson focused his attention this morning on what he thought would be the next trouble spot: Lehman Brothers. Investors may have

…

an isolated problem, as everyone seemed to be suggesting. As unpopular as it might be to state aloud, he intended to stress the fact that Bear Stearns—with its high leverage, virtually daily reliance on funding from others simply to stay in business, and interlocking trades with hundreds of other institutions—was

…

. “Shelby’s going to be difficult,” Nason warned. That was an understatement. Shelby was deeply unhappy with Paulson’s performance, not only because of the Bear Stearns bailout, but in response to another recent Paulson project: a provision in Bush’s economic stimulus package, introduced just days after the bailout, that raised

…

, and the Treasury Department, from any last-minute surprises. Staffers carefully checked that morning’s newspapers to make certain there was no new revelation about Bear Stearns or some harsh opinion from a columnist that a senator might quote that morning. Happily, there was nothing. Steel made the short trip from Treasury

…

with activity, as camera crews set up their equipment and photographers tested the light. As Steel took his seat, he noticed that Alan Schwartz of Bear Stearns had already arrived, even though he was not scheduled to testify until that afternoon, and greeted him. To Steel’s immediate left was Geithner; to

…

fireworks started almost immediately. Committee members were sharply critical of the regulators’ oversight of financial firms. More important, they questioned whether funding a takeover of Bear Stearns had created a dangerous precedent that would only encourage other firms to make risky bets, secure in the knowledge that the downside would be borne

…

almost giddy at the prospect of speaking at today’s hearing. While most CEOs dread being hauled in front of Congress—Alan D. Schwartz of Bear Stearns had spent days reviewing his testimony with his high-powered Washington lawyer, Robert S. Bennett—Dimon considered his first chance to testify in front of

…

began to stumble severely after the market for subprime mortgages imploded, JP Morgan stayed strong and steady. Indeed, a month before the panic erupted over Bear Stearns, Dimon boasted of his firm’s “fortress balance sheet” at an investors’ conference. “A fortress balance sheet is [sic] also a lot of liquidity

…

in the value of their toxic assets. The Federal Reserve issues non-recourse loans to banks, as it did in the JP Morgan takeover of Bear Stearns. The Federal Housing Authority refinances loans individually. Treasury directly invests in the banks. As he listened, Bernanke stroked his beard and occasionally offered a knowing

…

from us?” Diamond was momentarily speechless; Treasury, he realized, was clearly trying to formulate strategic solutions in the event that Lehman found itself in a Bear Stearns-like situation. From long acquaintance he knew Steel to be a no-nonsense pragmatist, not someone who idly floated trial balloons. “I’m going to

…

problem, interjected on behalf of Fuld. “What are you trying to accomplish, Jim?” he asked. “The shorts are destroying great companies,” Cramer replied. “They destroyed Bear Stearns, and they’re trying to destroy Lehman,” he said, perhaps trying to play to Fuld’s ego. “I want to stop that.” “If you’re

…

headlines that day struck him as very odd. All that summer, the implosion in subprime mortgages had been reverberating through the credit markets, and two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had large positions of mortgage-backed securities had already collapsed. Now BNP Paribas, the major French bank, had announced that it was

…

saw at Lehman, suggesting during a presentation to investors that “from a balance sheet and business mix perspective, Lehman is not that materially different from Bear Stearns.” That comment had gone largely unnoticed in the market, but it did raise the ire of Lehman and led to an hour-long phone call

…

its stock plummeting. He recounted how he had listened intently to Callan’s performance during her by now famous earnings call the day after the Bear Stearns fire sale. “On the conference call that day, Lehman CFO Erin Callan used the word ‘great’ fourteen times; ‘challenging’ six times; ‘strong’ twenty-four

…

a candidate to buy Lehman Brothers; Fink had only encouraged the speculation by appearing on CNBC earlier that day and declaring: “Lehman is not a Bear Stearns situation. Lehman Brothers is adequately structured in terms of avoiding a liquidity crisis.” The two executives were close—Fink, a fifty-five-year-old financier

…

of both companies were ousted. Fannie and Freddie were still reeling from the accounting scandals when in March 2008, just days after the rescue of Bear Stearns, the Bush administration lowered the amount of capital the two companies were required to have as a cushion against losses. In exchange, the companies pledged

…

market really was. An assured speaker, Parr launched into his regular skeptical boardroom speech. “It’s tough out there,” he said forebodingly. “Having been through Bear Stearns and MBIA”—two former clients—“there are some lessons we’ve learned.” Trying to make certain that Lehman’s directors understood the gravity of the

…

situation they were facing, he told them, “Liquidity can change faster than you can imagine,” suggesting they should not think Bear Stearns was a once-in-a-lifetime event. “Rating agencies are dangerous,” he went on. “Wherever you think you stand with the rating agencies, it’

…

Willumstad’s argument. “I can appreciate that,” Willumstad replied. “You never did it for brokers before either, but obviously there’s some room here.” After Bear Stearns’ near-death experience, the Fed had decided to open the discount window to brokerage firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman. “Yes

…

entire financial system, the Fed might indeed have broader obligations that might require intervention. It was precisely this view that influenced his thinking in protecting Bear Stearns. By this year’s conference the Bernanke Doctrine had come under attack. As Bernanke, looking exhausted, sat slumped at a long table in the lodge

…

in some of the biggest takeover battles in corporate America. Earlier in the year he had helped advise JP Morgan Chase in its acquisition of Bear Stearns. His firm—Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—was synonymous with corporate warfare. One of its founding partners, Martin Lipton, had devised among the most famous

…

sector codified. He said that he wanted AIG to be anointed a primary dealer, which would give it access to the emergency provision enacted after Bear Stearns’ sale, and thus enable it to tap the same extremely low rates for loans available only to the government and other primary dealers. Geithner stared

…

.” Perhaps most important, Paulson stressed, was that they couldn’t afford the political liability of putting up government money for Lehman as they had for Bear Stearns. “I can’t be Mr. Bailout,” he insisted, and given that everyone on the conference call had already lived through the backlash of that

…

-dealers did: by regularly rolling over short-term commercial paper contracts that had become subject to the same erosion of confidence that had brought down Bear Stearns—and now Lehman Brothers. To them the waning trust only suggested the nefarious handiwork of short-sellers. At one point, John Mack questioned the

…

that federal officials—including Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner—contributed to the market turmoil through a series of inconsistent decisions. They offered a safety net to Bear Stearns and backstopped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but allowed Lehman to fall into Chapter 11, only to rescue AIG soon after. What was the pattern

…

the firm.” Once the Barclays deal failed, it appears that the United States government truly did lack the regulatory tools to save Lehman. Unlike the Bear Stearns situation, in which JP Morgan was used as a vehicle to funnel emergency loans to Bear, there was no financial institution available to act as

…

.gov/products/GGD-94–133. “The impact on the broader economy”: “Chairman Bernanke Testifies Before Joint Economic Committee,” U.S. Fed News, March 28, 2007. Bear Stearns’ hedge funds failing: In July 2007, the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund and the High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund caved in

…

to vomit!”: A version of this story was previously reported by Kelly, Street Fighters, 204. raise the price to $10: Kate Kelly, “The Fall of Bear Stearns: Bear Stearns Neared Collapse Twice in Frenzied Last Days,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2008. “I could see something nominal, like one or two dollars per share

…

25, 2008. Bear’s shareholders and employees had practically revolted: Ibid. “This isn’t a shotgun marriage”: Moldaver, as reported by Kelly, “The Fall of Bear Stearns,” Wall Street Journal. “All these years of deregulation by the Republicans”: Maura Reynolds and Janet Hook, “Critics Say Bush Is Out of Touch on the

…

a Hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee,” Federal News Service, April 3, 2008. “I am very troubled by the failure of Bear Stearns”: “Panel I of a Hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee,” Federal News Service, April 3, 2008. CHAPTER FOUR private dinner to

…

Holdings Inc. Earnings Conference Call,” September 18, 2007. “This is crazy accounting”: Lindgren, “The Confidence Man,” New York. “Lehman is not that materially different from Bear Stearns”: David Einhorn, “Private Profits and Socialized Risk,” Grant’s Spring Investment Conference, April 8, 2008. “I can only feel that you set me up”: Einhorn

…

.php. “Our credibility has eroded”: Yalman Onaran, “Lehman Drops Callan, Gregory; McDade Named President,” Bloomberg News, June 12, 2008. CHAPTER SEVEN “Lehman is not a Bear Stearns situation”: “BlackRock’s Fink Says Lehman Not Another Bear—CNBC,” Reuters, June 11, 2008. Fleming had helped broker a 2006 deal to merge Merrill’s

…

26, 2009. the headline “King Henry”: Newsweek, September 29, 2008. a quote from Governor Jon Corzine: “There hasn’t been a consistent pattern…. We save Bear Stearns but not Lehman. The market is going to have a hard time sorting through what the underlying principle is.” Daniel Gross, “The Captain of the

…

Greenspan, Alan. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. New York: Penguin Press, 2007. Kelly, Kate. Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street. New York: Portfolio, 2009. Langley, Monica. Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top

All the Devils Are Here

by Bethany McLean  · 19 Oct 2010  · 543pp  · 157,991 words

in 2005. Forced out by the board in 2008. Robert Willumstad Sullivan’s successor as CEO until the financial crisis hit four months later. Bear Stearns Ralph Cioffi Bear Stearns hedge fund manager. His two funds—originally worth $20 billion—went bankrupt in the summer of 2007 because of their subprime exposure. Matthew Tannin

…

the previous year, after he had been banished from the trading floor. The reckless behavior this implied was just incredible. A few months earlier, two Bear Stearns hedge funds—funds that contained the exact same kind of subprime securities as the ones on Merrill’s books—had collapsed. Inside Merrill, there was

…

a room and insisted that they hammer out a rescue plan. In the end, fourteen firms injected equity into LTCM, effectively taking it over. (Only Bear Stearns refused to participate.) In other words, it was government action—not market discipline—that prevented disaster. Washington was every bit as terrified as Wall Street

…

-backed securities, purchasing and reassembling an astonishing 85 to 95 percent of them at the peak, according to a presentation by Karan P. S. Chabba, Bear Stearns’s structured credit strategist. Among other consequences, this practice helped perpetuate the worst, most dangerous securities, because they were the ones that had the highest

…

long before 2007. By the fall of 2005, Moody’s market capitalization had grown to more than $15 billion. That was roughly the same as Bear Stearns. Yet Bear Stearns had 11,000 employees and $7 billion of revenue, while Moody’s had 2,500 employees and $1.6 billion of revenue. Moody’s

…

at Long Beach and then went on to form several other subprime companies, recalls a meeting in 2003 with some representatives of Bear Stearns. “How can you increase your volume?” the Bear Stearns bankers asked him. “We said, tongue in cheek, ‘Well, we can do a 100 percent loan-to-value stated-income loan

…

the money will be available the instant it wants it back. Enter the repo market. Fidelity can deposit the $500 million with an investment bank—Bear Stearns, in Gorton’s example—and be sure the money is safe, because Bear provides collateral to back up the loan. The difference between the money

…

was William Donaldson. Historically, the SEC oversaw everything that had to do with the buying and selling of stocks. The five big American investment banks—Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers—all came under the regulatory purview of the SEC. But they had all formed holding companies

…

the other side of those bets, because that is, by definition, the way a credit default swap works. Three firms—Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Bear Stearns—led the drive to turn credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities into easily tradable, standardized instruments. The group, which included Deutsche Bank trader Greg

…

. Once again, Goldman had to push hard to sell the deal. Finally, though, Goldman was able to sell about $300 million of Timberwolf securities to Bear Stearns Asset Management. The firm sold another $78 million—at a sizable discount—to an Australian fund called the Basis Yield Alpha Fund, which at the

…

a football owner to bench a star quarterback to improve the odds of his wager against the team.” That was the description Scott Eichel, a Bear Stearns trader, gave to Gregory Zuckerman, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose book The Greatest Trade Ever documented Paulson’s audacious short. Eichel explained to Zuckerman

…

the pain. —Dan Sparks e-mail, March 1, 2007 On Friday, March 2, 2007, a man named Ralph Cioffi, who ran two hedge funds at Bear Stearns that had some $20 billion invested in asset-backed securities, held a small, impromptu meeting in his office. Matt Tannin, who managed the two funds

…

short positions they had placed on the ABX, but the volatility was worrisome. Because the higher-rated securities were supposed to be nearly riskless, the Bear Stearns hedge funds were highly leveraged: only about $1.6 billion of the $20 billion was equity. The rest was borrowed. Earlier in February, they’d

…

was the absolute lifeblood of the funds,” Tannin’s lawyer later said. Their first fund, the High-Grade Structured Credit Fund, which was part of Bear Stearns Asset Management, was started by Cioffi in the fall of 2003. Like many Bear employees, Cioffi had been a scrappy, lower-middle-class kid; during

…

Cioffi in early 2007. “I will be eternally grateful.” The High Grade fund started small. Some of its investors were high-net-worth customers of Bear Stearns, one of whom would later say that he thought he was getting in on a special “club.” In truth, though, High Grade wasn’t all

…

was when Cioffi and Tannin launched a second fund whose name could not have been more perfect for the times. The fund was called the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Limited Partnership (Enhanced Leverage, for short). Its point of differentiation was the enormous leverage it planned to use

…

time for him. But he would later note in his diary: “As I sat in John’s office”—John Geissinger, the chief investment officer at Bear Stearns Asset Management—“I had a wave of fear set over me—that the fund couldn’t be fun the way that I was ‘hoping.’ And

…

lose millions and the cdo business will not be the same for years.” The weeks since the toast had not brought better days for the Bear Stearns team as they had hoped. Both funds were now losing money. “Im sick to my stomach over our performance in march,” wrote Cioffi in another

…

expense of their profits. Some of the controversy broke into public view in April, when the Wall Street Journal reported on an exchange between the Bear Stearns mortgage desk and John Paulson. Bear sent Paulson a copy of language it drafted to the basic ISDA swap contract. It unequivocally gave the underwriter

…

see how different default rates would affect CDO tranches. It is both telling and stunning that a firm of the size and supposed sophistication of Bear Stearns didn’t have the ability to do this before launching hedge funds whose prospects would be dependent on that very thing. Van Solkema later told

…

as dire as the model suggested. In that same e-mail to Cioffi’s wife, Tannin stated that Andrew Lipton, the head of surveillance at Bear Stearns Asset Management—and a former Moody’s executive—was still positive. “I sat him down on Friday and asked how serious he thought the situation

…

also wrote that Bear’s CDO analyst, Gyan Sinha, had issued an optimistic report about subprime mortgages in February. Denial seemed to be rampant at Bear Stearns. On March 1, two Bear analysts upgraded New Century’s stock. The stock of Bear itself hit an all-time high of $172.69 on

…

million line of credit from Citigroup. But the deal seemed so obviously self-serving that a furor erupted, and it became impossible to complete. The Bear Stearns team also began rushing to complete another deal that had been in the works: a CDO squared made out of the funds’ holdings of CDOs

…

was issued by the new CDO in the event of problems. Money market funds bought most of the commercial paper. Later, Bank of America sued Bear Stearns, Cioffi, Tannin, and McGarrigal for allegedly hiding the funds’ true condition. As part of the lawsuit, the bank also claimed that it had gotten a

…

$10 million in the High Grade fund. When Tannin heard the news, he asked for a meeting with Greg Quental, who was the head of Bear Stearns Asset Management’s hedge fund business. After the meeting, Quental announced that the Bear funds wouldn’t be taking any new investments. At the end

…

, Bear had told investors in the Enhanced Leverage fund that it had lost 6.5 percent in April. But at a meeting on May 31, Bear Stearns’s pricing committee, which determined the funds’ returns by surveying how its counterparties were marking the securities, decided the fund had actually lost 18.97

…

with the repo lenders to try to cut deals. At that meeting, according to House of Cards, William Cohan’s book about the fall of Bear Stearns, the Bear executives gave a presentation showing the exposure the rest of the Street had to the firm’s hedge funds. Overall, sixteen Wall Street

…

said. On July 24, 2007, two weeks after the rating agencies made their first big downgrade move and one week before the bankruptcy of the Bear Stearns hedge funds, Countrywide announced its results for the first half of the year. In a last, desperate grab for market share, Countrywide had waited until

…

—would be much too bad for the world to end—but that’s sure how it feels.” 20 The Dumb Guys The collapse of the Bear Stearns hedge funds in June 2007 should have been a terrifying moment for Stan O’Neal. Merrill Lynch had been the first to make a grab

…

better performance from our U.S. subprime mortgage activities.” Acknowledging that the market for CDOs “has yet to fully stabilize” after the collapse of the Bear Stearns hedge funds, Edwards added that “[r]isk management, hedging, and cost controls in this business are especially critical during such periods of difficulty, and ours

…

, it appears that Semerci and Lattanzio did not fully understand the import of their strategy. Why? Because just like Ralph Cioffi and Mike Tannin at Bear Stearns, Semerci and Lattanzio still believed that a triple-A rating meant something. As the market had gotten shaky, they had begun shorting the ABX triple

…

. And Forster was clearly worried that downgrades—and collateral calls—were coming. All he had to do was look at what had happened to the Bear Stearns hedge funds to know that the unimaginable was now a very real possibility. “Every fucking one, every rating agency we’ve spoke to . . . every time

…

banks and brokerages and institutional investors strike most laymen as impenetrably complex, but a simple ingredient lubricates the engine: trust,” wrote Alan “Ace” Greenberg, former Bear Stearns chairman, in a memoir co-authored by Mark Singer. “Without reciprocal trust between the parties to any securities transaction, the money stops. Doubt fills the

…

to become contagious and self-perpetuating.” Which is exactly what happened. On Monday, March 10—the beginning of its last week as an independent firm—Bear Stearns’s stock stood at around $70 a share. It had bank financing of about $120 billion and $18 billion in cash. But, recalled Greenberg, “some

…

probably wouldn’t renew a $2 billion line of credit the following week.” On Wednesday, CEO Alan Schwartz went on CNBC, where he denied that Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. If anything, that only made matters worse: going on TV to deny liquidity problems was likely to create liquidity problems, because

…

. Already nervous at the beginning of the week, Paulson pressed Bush not to say there would be “no bailouts.” And by Monday morning, March 17, Bear Stearns had been sold to J.P. Morgan for $2 a share. Paulson, who had urged J.P. Morgan to make the deal so that Bear

…

antennae so attuned to Wall Street, Paulson had long thought the next shoe could be Lehman Brothers, the second smallest of the big five. When Bear Stearns started its downward spiral, Paulson had called Lehman CEO Dick Fuld, who was on a business trip in India. “You better get back here,” Paulson

…

Lehman that were supposed to determine its ability to withstand a run on the bank. The Fed devised two scenarios, which they called Bear and Bear Stearns Lite. Lehman Brothers failed both. The Fed came up with an additional round of tests; Lehman failed those, too. Lehman did pass stress tests of

…

for himself whether that assessment was right or wrong. And Fannie and Freddie were every bit as vulnerable to a run on the bank as Bear Stearns—maybe even more vulnerable, because their capital cushion was so small. It really wouldn’t take much to put them over the edge. If panicked

…

occurred because of the systemic abuse of trust in capital markets,” says Australian financial analyst and historian John Hempton. “The blowups of subprime, then of Bear Stearns, and then of Fannie exposed massive lies. Then we went from a collective belief in soundness to a collective belief in insolvency.” It took the

…

most people weren’t paying attention to such things. There have been, of course, numerous books written about the financial crisis since the fall of Bear Stearns in the spring of 2008. We’ve cited a number of them in the text, but we would be remiss if we did not single

…

The Age of Turbulence, by Alan Greenspan (and Peter Petre), In an Uncertain World, by Robert Rubin (and Jacob Weisberg), The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns, by Alan “Ace” Greenberg (and Mark Singer), and most especially On the Brink, by Henry Paulson, a fount of insight about what key players were

…

acquired by Merrill Lynch acquired by subprime branches, closing Barnes, Roy Bartiromo, Maria Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, capital reserves rule Basis Yield Alpha Fund Bear Stearns ABS index Bank of America lawsuit CDOs foreclosures, plan to prevent hedge funds, collapse of High-Grade Structured Credit Fund High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies

…

’s Clinton, Bill derivatives regulation, neglect of homeownership initiative Coffin, Charles Cohan, William Cohen & Company Cohn, Gary Collateral calls, to AIG Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) Bear Stearns BISTRO as precursor to collapse of market (2007) danger and warning about downgrading (2002-2003) downgrading (2007) features of high ratings, reasons for hybrid CDOs

…

Hard-money lenders leading companies legislation and expansion of operation of second-lien mortgages by subprime MBS, first Harris, Patricia Hawke, John Hedge funds, at Bear Stearns, collapse of Hedging, dynamic hedging Hibbert, Eric High loan-to-value lending (HLTV) Holder, Steve Holding companies Home equity loans Homeownership and baby boomers Bush

…

firms ISDA swap contract J. Aron Jedinak, Russell and Rebecca Johnson, Jim biographical information Fannie expansion under on Maxwell style/personality of J.P. Morgan Bear Stearns acquired by BISTRO CEOs. See Weatherstone, Sir Dennis credit default swaps derivatives lobbying by quants/quantitative analysis risk management special purpose entity (SPE) synthetics trading

…

O’Neill, Sandler Option One Orkin, Michael Overcollateralization Ownit Parekh, Ketan Park, Gene Parker, Ed Partnership offices Patrick, Deval Patrick, Tom Paulson, Henry, Jr. and Bear Stearns buyout during collapse compensation from Goldman derivatives, regulatory efforts Goldman Sachs under GSEs, approach to and Lehman collapse style/personality of and TARP Paulson, John

…

, meaning that Goldman would make money if the stock fell. By the summer of 2007, the department was also seeking permission to short Countrywide, IndyMac, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and MBIA. 16 In response to Levin’s charge that S&P refused to reevaluate existing residential mortgage-backed

The End of Wall Street

by Roger Lowenstein  · 15 Jan 2010  · 460pp  · 122,556 words

built AIG’s financial-products unit into a powerhouse that was overexposed to credit default swap losses JAMES E. (JIMMY) CAYNE, bridge-playing CEO of Bear Stearns, retired as the firm’s troubles were mounting H. RODGIN COHEN, Zelig-like partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, involved in numerous high-stakes Wall Street negotiations

…

seemed generic, steady and safe. Also, the mortgage business was wide open. Rivals could scarcely dream of muscling Goldman aside on mergers and acquisitions, but Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the like had no trouble acquiring mortgages to feed their securitization machines. Some banks merely traded mortgages, but Lehman handled every aspect of

…

huge pipeline and everyone is coveting it.” True enough, banks of pedigree low and high were striving to match Lehman’s franchise. In 2006, Bear Stearns knitted together 2,800 Alt-A mortgages and devised an impossibly complex structure—with thirty-seven layers of bonds—against it. According to a confidential

…

Westchester County, and the oak-paneled rooms of the Harvard Club in New York. He sold CDOs to a pair of hedge funds run by Bear Stearns and to global investors in Australia, Singapore, and Europe. Always, he stressed that CDOs paid a higher yield than similarly rated corporate bonds. Meanwhile,

…

John Mack, $41 million at Morgan Stanley; Lloyd Blankfein, $55 million at Goldman; Richard Fuld, $28 million at Lehman; and James Cayne, $40 million at Bear Stearns.19 Such sums reflected a suave self-assurance and remunerated arrogance. Their profits were at a record, their status exalted, their corporate palaces bedecked in

…

so sure. Every day a different institution admitted to a problem. Countrywide disclosed that its finances were in jeopardy; then the two top executives of Bear Stearns nervously visited Morgan, almost begging for their support. “It was like watching popcorn,” the Morgan banker said. “You didn’t know where it would

…

assets,” the BBC pronounced rather optimistically, “but they [the assets] are tied up in loans to homeowners.” The same plight that had struck the Bear Stearns hedge funds now had felled a large British bank. Who would be next? Bernanke told Paulson they should prepare for the day when some sort

…

die,” he added, “I will reach back from the grave and prevent it.”30 9 RUBICON The Federal Reserve was not founded to bail out Bear Stearns. —JIM ROGERS THE WEEK BEFORE Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2008, Eric Dinallo, New York State’s top insurance regulator, got a series of

…

conducted an overnight conference call with Geithner in New York and Paulson and Steel at Treasury. It centered on a single question: should they help Bear Stearns? Failure could be grievous for money market funds that had invested in Bear, also for derivative markets. Geithner feared a broader panic, as had

…

meddling or insensitive to moral hazard. Geithner insisted in testimony to the Senate that the Fed only lent to “sound institutions,” though that hardly described Bear Stearns.31 But he, like Paulson and Bernanke, were concerned that their scope was too limited. The system should not be so fragile as to

…

in London on July 2, in which he called for legislative changes to permit federal takeovers of failed investment banks. Betraying his fear of another Bear Stearns, Paulson declared, “We need to create a resolution process that ensures the financial system can withstand the failure of a large complex financial firm.”

…

he added, in somewhat contradictory fashion, that his first duty was ensuring market stability.12 The tension between stability and moral hazard had raged since Bear Stearns, and it was not going away. Investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were highly unsettled, and Fannie and Freddie—responsible for about half

…

to buffer a large-scale economic crisis. Arguably, the government had answered this very question in the affirmative with respect to the rescued creditors of Bear Stearns. In social terms, homeowners had at least as valid a claim to public aid as did Wall Street investors. Bernanke was sympathetic to the

…

smattering of hedge funds, as a precautionary measure, began to lighten their accounts at Lehman—a dark echo of the liquidity pressures that had befallen Bear Stearns.31 One investment manager who called Tonucci sensed that the treasurer was “going call to call,” assuring each party of Lehman’s putative soundness.

…

the birth of a new regulator. “Excuse us for being skeptical, but our existing regulatory agencies failed to control the excessive leverage building up within.” Bear Stearns, Rodriguez admonished, supposedly was to have been the last of such rescues. Now it had been followed by Fannie and Freddie. “We feel disgusted

…

of the professorial life that Bernanke no longer had. Given the risks to the financial system, he felt, attacks on the Fed for saving Bear Stearns were naïve, bordering on personal.ae The most trenchant note at Jackson Hole was struck by a former Japanese central banker, who recalled his country

…

. As a representative of a foreign bank, he could not be seen as poaching. Moreover, Barclays was still demanding a federally assisted deal. The Bear Stearns rescue had poisoned the waters; everyone expected the government to help with Lehman, too. Paulson feverishly tried to dash such hopes. He spread the word

…

find a well-heeled acquirer, failing which it would lower Lehman’s credit rating three notches and possibly more. Thinking of the rapid unwind of Bear Stearns, Moody’s gave Lehman to understand that its deadline was Monday.21 Lehman received similar warnings from Standard & Poor’s. These were deadly serious

…

man who, after months of waiting, will enter a long-expected battle in the morning. Lehman had not sneaked up on him unnoticed, as had Bear Stearns. The various agencies of the federal government knew Lehman’s assets, knew its liabilities. They were, they supposed, ready. Most of the bankers inside

…

the weekend. Given AIG’s complexity, the request seemed faintly absurd.al Next, Willumstad called Chris Flowers, the private equity banker who had bid for Bear Stearns. He asked Willumstad what was up. “We’re going to run out of cash on Wednesday,” Willumstad said bluntly. Flowers blinked. AIG had $1

…

on Friday. FRIDAY MORNING, Paulson briefed President Bush, emphasizing that Lehman Brothers might not survive the weekend. Bush, naturally, asked why Lehman was different from Bear Stearns. Paulson replied that, thus far, no buyer had appeared. And Paulson, now, was fully invested in the cause of preventing moral hazard. The president agreed

…

.”12 This language is not exactly airtight, and the Fed governors knew they had bent the rule (if not broken it) in the case of Bear Stearns. However, Lehman and Bear were not entirely analogous. Lehman’s assets, especially its commercial loans and private equity, were considered riskier than Bear’s.

…

one at Lehman was picking up the phone.1 The psychological blow of seeing a major bank disintegrate was profound. The comforting precedent set by Bear Stearns and reinforced by Fannie and Freddie—that creditors would be protected—was demolished in a stroke. If Paulson had wanted to demonstrate that investors

…

the government. Ultimately, he was forced to call Dimon—an awkward call that ended quickly, as Dimon had no interest. JPMorgan was still digesting Bear Stearns and had no stomach for acquiring another investment bank.24 Moreover, JPMorgan concluded it could not justify even a loan to Morgan Stanley. A group

…

Morgan Stanley and Goldman to convert to banks. In a practical sense, this did not greatly enhance their borrowing capabilities; from the time of the Bear Stearns rescue the Fed had gradually liberalized the borrowing options for Wall Street. Significantly, that Sunday, it permitted investment banks to use the same collateral as

…

the Debt Securities,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2007. 18 “$1.8 trillion”: Kate Kelly, Serena Ng, and David Reilly, “Two Big Funds at Bear Stearns Face Shutdown—As Rescue Plan Falters Amid Subprime Woes, Merrill Asserts Claims,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2007. 19 John Oros, tape of speech, “The

…

, “Bear CEO’s Handling of Crisis Raises Issues,” Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2007. 11 This account draws on Bryan Burrough’s excellent “Bringing Down Bear Stearns,” Vanity Fair, August 1, 2008. 12 “Rodgin Cohen”: Bob Steel, interview with the author; “$1 billion”: John Oros, tape of speech “The Current State

…

of Financial Markets and the Federal Government Policy Response,” Wisconsin School of Business, September 29, 2008.” 13 Burrough, “Bringing Down Bear Stearns.” 14 Geithner’s view: Bob Steel, interview with the author. Geithner and Rubin: Jeff Gerth and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “As Crisis Loomed, Geithner Pressed

…

capital markets were shutting down.” 24 After the fact, and after the AIG and other dramatic episodes of failure, Bernanke seemed to acknowledge that the Bear Stearns rescue was not strictly grounded in either law or regulation. In a speech on December 1, 2008, the chairman remarked, “In the absence of

…

an appropriate, comprehensive legal or regulatory framework, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury dealt with the cases of Bear Stearns and AIG using the tools available.” 25 Susanne Craig, Jeffrey McCracken, Aaron Lucchetti, and Kate Kelly, “The Weekend That Wall Street Died,” Wall Street

…

Bank of New York Bank One bank runs bankruptcy, academic theory of Barbera, Robert Barclays Barings Bank Basel II Baxter, Thomas Bear Stearns Alternative-A loans, packaging of bailout of. See Bear Stearns bailout Ben Bernanke and capital raised by CDOs and failure to pull back from mortgage-backed securities hedge funds organized by

…

JPMorgan Chase and leadership change at leverage of Merrill Lynch and net worth New York Federal Reserve Bank and shareholders stock price of Bear Stearns bailout criticism of Jamie Dimon and effects of fear of systemic collapse and Federal Reserve and Timothy Geithner and JPMorgan Chase involvement in Lehman Brothers

…

with Hank Paulson and Beattie, Richard Beneficial Loan Society Bent, Bruce Bernanke, Ben S.. See also Federal Reserve AIG and on banking system as healthy Bear Stearns bailout and on bubbles childhood home of Congress and conservatism of criticism of deflation measures of Fed-centric view of financial crisis, response to Freddie

…

of subprime mortgages and Wachovia and Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary CNBC Cohen, H. Rodgin Cohn, Gary collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) AIG and amount invested in Bear Stearns and bond ratings for Citigroup and demand for Federal Reserve and insurance for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and squared synthetic UBS and yields on

…

market blow-ups regulation of risk, effect on SEC and Deutsche Bank Diamond, Robert Dime Savings Bank Dimon, James (Jamie) AIG and annual letter (2007) Bear Stearns acquisition and on financial crises Lehman Brothers and John Mack and Merrill Lynch and power of on SIVs TARP and Washington Mutual and Dinallo, Eric

…

Insurance Act Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Federal Housing Finance Agency Federal Reserve AIG rescue and assets of balance sheet as bank to Wall Street Bear Stearns bailout and CDOs and commercial paper and compensation and Congress and duties and powers of faith in financial crisis, response to forecasts by Freddie Mac

…

last days and long tenure of Hank Paulson and personality and character of Gamble, James (Jamie) GDP Geithner, Timothy AIG and bank debt guarantees and Bear Stearns bailout and career of China and Citigroup and financial crisis, response to Lehman Brothers and money markets and Morgan Stanley and in Obama administration Hank

…

Ireland Jackson, Michael Japan J.C. Flowers &. Co. Jensen, Michael Jester, Dan Johnson, James Johnson, Lyndon JPMorgan Chase AIG and as banker to Wall Street Bear Stearns and history of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and subprime mortgages and Washington Mutual and Kaufman, Henry Kelleher, Colm Kelly, Pete Kelly

…

problem assets real estate and short-selling against Standard and Poor’s and stock price of traders as backbone of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy AIG and Bear Stearns bailout compared with Ben Bernanke and board and buildup to CEOs’ weekend meeting in advance of criticism of effects of Federal Reserve and Fed’

…

market; stock market Maughan, Deryck Mayo, Michael MBIA MDC Holdings Meltzer, Allan Merkel, Angela Merrill Lynch Bank of America’s negotiations with and acquisition of Bear Stearns and Ben Bernanke and board of capital raised by CDOs and change of leadership at come-to-Jesus moment for compensation at concern over Jamie

…

Mitsubishi and panic and Hank Paulson and rumors about short selling against stock price of John Thain and Wachovia and mortgage-backed securities BBB rated Bear Stearns and checks on capital level for collapse of market for collateralized debt obligations. See collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) cooling of market for credit rating

…

Century Mortgage New Deal new finance, failure of new normal New York City New York Federal Reserve Bank AIG and as arm of Federal Reserve Bear Stearns and building of Citigroup and Lehman Brothers and response to financial crisis role of New York State, AIG and New York Stock Exchange New

…

to stem failure to halt global Morgan Stanley and repercussions of Wall Street’s susceptibility to Partnoy, Frank Paterson, David Paulson, Henry (Hank) AIG and Bear Stearns bailout and Ben Bernanke and Lloyd Blankfein and George W. Bush and capital injection and Citigroup and Congress and conservatism of financial crisis, response to

…

short selling restrictions on securitization of assets of mortgage debt. See mortgage-backed securities Shafron, Steve Shannon, Kathy shareholders/investors AIG annual letters to Barclays Bear Stearns Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae Washington Mutual Sherburne, Jane short selling against Goldman Sachs John Mack’s campaign against against Morgan Stanley SEC ban and

…

Vander State Street statistical modeling AIG’s correlations as key to in credit ratings inadequacy of Wall Street’s Steel, Robert Steinbrück, Peer stock market Bear Stearns bailout and bottoming out of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bailout and Lehman’s bankruptcy and rebound of as stable TARP and stock market crashes

…

1929 1978 1987 2008 stock/stock prices AIG Bank of America Bear Stearns Citigroup Countrywide Financial Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae Goldman Sachs historical Lehman Brothers manipulation of Merrill Lynch Morgan Stanley nonfinancial short selling. See short selling

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead

by Alan S. Blinder  · 24 Jan 2013  · 566pp  · 155,428 words

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle

by Diana B. Henriques  · 1 Aug 2011  · 598pp  · 169,194 words

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

by William D. Cohan  · 15 Nov 2009  · 620pp  · 214,639 words

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe

by Greg Ip  · 12 Oct 2015  · 309pp  · 95,495 words

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

by Lawrence G. Mcdonald and Patrick Robinson  · 21 Jul 2009  · 430pp  · 140,405 words

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System

by Henry M. Paulson  · 15 Sep 2010  · 468pp  · 145,998 words

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America

by Danielle Dimartino Booth  · 14 Feb 2017  · 479pp  · 113,510 words

Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story

by Greg Smith  · 21 Oct 2012  · 304pp  · 99,836 words

Money Free and Unfree

by George A. Selgin  · 14 Jun 2017  · 454pp  · 134,482 words

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It

by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig  · 15 Feb 2013  · 726pp  · 172,988 words

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff

by Christine S. Richard  · 26 Apr 2010  · 459pp  · 118,959 words

Empire of the Fund: The Way We Save Now

by William A. Birdthistle  · 15 May 2016  · 375pp  · 106,189 words

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

by Timothy F. Geithner  · 11 May 2014  · 593pp  · 189,857 words

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis

by Johan Norberg  · 14 Sep 2009  · 246pp  · 74,341 words

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein

by James Patterson, John Connolly and Tim Malloy  · 10 Oct 2016  · 234pp  · 63,844 words

Firefighting

by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner and Henry M. Paulson, Jr.  · 16 Apr 2019

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 9 Jun 2010  · 584pp  · 187,436 words

The Quants

by Scott Patterson  · 2 Feb 2010  · 374pp  · 114,600 words

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone

by David Carey  · 7 Feb 2012  · 421pp  · 128,094 words

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System

by Philip Augar  · 20 Apr 2005  · 290pp  · 83,248 words

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 10 Oct 2016  · 1,242pp  · 317,903 words

Panderer to Power

by Frederick Sheehan  · 21 Oct 2009  · 435pp  · 127,403 words

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic

by David Wessel  · 3 Aug 2009  · 350pp  · 109,220 words

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase

by Duff McDonald  · 5 Oct 2009  · 419pp  · 130,627 words

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze  · 31 Jul 2018  · 1,066pp  · 273,703 words

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire

by Neil Irwin  · 4 Apr 2013  · 597pp  · 172,130 words

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism

by William Baker and Addison Wiggin  · 2 Nov 2009  · 444pp  · 151,136 words

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences

by Steven G. Mandis  · 9 Sep 2013  · 413pp  · 117,782 words

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition

by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber  · 9 Aug 2011

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again

by Nicholas Dunbar  · 11 Jul 2011  · 350pp  · 103,270 words

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown

by Simon Johnson and James Kwak  · 29 Mar 2010  · 430pp  · 109,064 words

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

by Jeff Madrick  · 11 Jun 2012  · 840pp  · 202,245 words

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 10 Oct 2018  · 482pp  · 149,351 words

Why Wall Street Matters

by William D. Cohan  · 27 Feb 2017  · 113pp  · 37,885 words

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies

by Jeremy Siegel  · 7 Jan 2014  · 517pp  · 139,477 words

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts

by Ashoka Mody  · 7 May 2018

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis

by Kevin Rodgers  · 13 Jul 2016  · 318pp  · 99,524 words

Madoff: The Final Word

by Richard Behar  · 9 Jul 2024

When Free Markets Fail: Saving the Market When It Can't Save Itself (Wiley Corporate F&A)

by Scott McCleskey  · 10 Mar 2011

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America

by Greg Farrell  · 2 Nov 2010  · 526pp  · 158,913 words

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe

by Gillian Tett  · 11 May 2009  · 311pp  · 99,699 words

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

by Philip Mirowski  · 24 Jun 2013  · 662pp  · 180,546 words

The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual-The Biggest Bank Failure in American History

by Kirsten Grind  · 11 Jun 2012  · 549pp  · 147,112 words

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

by Guy Spier  · 8 Sep 2014  · 240pp  · 73,209 words

Big Debt Crises

by Ray Dalio  · 9 Sep 2018  · 782pp  · 187,875 words

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business

by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan  · 28 Jan 2020  · 218pp  · 62,889 words

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance

by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm  · 10 May 2010  · 491pp  · 131,769 words

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction

by Richard Bookstaber  · 1 May 2017  · 293pp  · 88,490 words

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan

by Lynne B. Sagalyn  · 8 Sep 2016  · 1,797pp  · 390,698 words

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

by Sheelah Kolhatkar  · 7 Feb 2017  · 385pp  · 118,901 words

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller  · 1 Jan 2009  · 471pp  · 97,152 words

Paper Promises

by Philip Coggan  · 1 Dec 2011  · 376pp  · 109,092 words

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money

by Steven Drobny  · 18 Mar 2010  · 537pp  · 144,318 words

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street

by Jonathan A. Knee  · 31 Jul 2006  · 362pp  · 108,359 words

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

by Andrew W. Lo  · 3 Apr 2017  · 733pp  · 179,391 words

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar  · 1 Jan 1990  · 713pp  · 203,688 words

Stock Market Wizards: Interviews With America's Top Stock Traders

by Jack D. Schwager  · 1 Jan 2001

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Matt Taibbi  · 15 Feb 2010  · 291pp  · 91,783 words

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything

by Jason Kelly  · 10 Sep 2012  · 274pp  · 81,008 words

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare

by Ryan Dezember  · 13 Jul 2020  · 279pp  · 87,875 words

For Profit: A History of Corporations

by William Magnuson  · 8 Nov 2022  · 356pp  · 116,083 words

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance

by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani and Ionut Florescu  · 20 Dec 2011  · 443pp  · 51,804 words

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds

by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes and Mohamed El-Erian  · 29 May 2012  · 302pp  · 86,614 words

How to Kick Ass on Wall Street

by Andy Kessler  · 4 Jun 2012  · 77pp  · 18,414 words

Economists and the Powerful

by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring and Niall Douglas  · 30 Sep 2012  · 261pp  · 103,244 words

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover

by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider  · 9 Jan 2009  · 278pp  · 82,069 words

Unfinished Business

by Tamim Bayoumi  · 405pp  · 109,114 words

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope

by John A. Allison  · 20 Sep 2012  · 348pp  · 99,383 words

Rigged Money: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game

by Lee Munson  · 6 Dec 2011  · 236pp  · 77,735 words

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi  · 8 Apr 2014  · 455pp  · 138,716 words

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile

by Alexander Davidson  · 1 Apr 2008  · 368pp  · 32,950 words

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

by David Rothkopf  · 18 Mar 2008  · 535pp  · 158,863 words

I Love Capitalism!: An American Story

by Ken Langone  · 14 May 2018

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

by Michael Lewis  · 2 Oct 2011  · 180pp  · 61,340 words

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

by John Cassidy  · 10 Nov 2009  · 545pp  · 137,789 words

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression

by Richard A. Posner  · 30 Apr 2009  · 305pp  · 69,216 words

The History of Money

by David McWilliams  · 330pp  · 110,174 words

Who Stole the American Dream?

by Hedrick Smith  · 10 Sep 2012  · 598pp  · 172,137 words

Hedge Fund Market Wizards

by Jack D. Schwager  · 24 Apr 2012  · 272pp  · 19,172 words

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 11 Apr 2011  · 429pp  · 120,332 words

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits

by Kevin Roose  · 18 Feb 2014  · 269pp  · 83,307 words

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

by Gary Gerstle  · 14 Oct 2022  · 655pp  · 156,367 words

Liar's Poker

by Michael Lewis  · 1 Jan 1989  · 314pp  · 101,452 words

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else

by Steve Lohr  · 10 Mar 2015  · 239pp  · 70,206 words

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society

by Will Hutton  · 30 Sep 2010  · 543pp  · 147,357 words

Electronic and Algorithmic Trading Technology: The Complete Guide

by Kendall Kim  · 31 May 2007  · 224pp  · 13,238 words

Warnings

by Richard A. Clarke  · 10 Apr 2017  · 428pp  · 121,717 words

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World

by Tom Burgis  · 7 Sep 2020  · 476pp  · 139,761 words

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times

by Lionel Barber  · 5 Nov 2020

Planet Ponzi

by Mitch Feierstein  · 2 Feb 2012  · 393pp  · 115,263 words

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis

by Martin Wolf  · 24 Nov 2015  · 524pp  · 143,993 words

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

by Niall Ferguson  · 13 Nov 2007  · 471pp  · 124,585 words

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

by Alice Schroeder  · 1 Sep 2008  · 1,336pp  · 415,037 words

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis

by James Rickards  · 10 Nov 2011  · 381pp  · 101,559 words

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin  · 8 Oct 2012  · 823pp  · 206,070 words

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

by Paul Collier  · 4 Dec 2018  · 310pp  · 85,995 words

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History

by Alexis Stenfors  · 14 May 2017  · 312pp  · 93,836 words

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right

by George R. Tyler  · 15 Jul 2013  · 772pp  · 203,182 words

The Money Machine: How the City Works

by Philip Coggan  · 1 Jul 2009  · 253pp  · 79,214 words

Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government

by Paul Volcker and Christine Harper  · 30 Oct 2018  · 363pp  · 98,024 words

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market

by Philip Augar  · 4 Jul 2018  · 457pp  · 143,967 words

The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All

by Mary Childs  · 15 Mar 2022  · 367pp  · 110,161 words

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

by Jacob Goldstein  · 14 Aug 2020  · 199pp  · 64,272 words

Den of Thieves

by James B. Stewart  · 14 Oct 1991  · 706pp  · 206,202 words

How Money Became Dangerous

by Christopher Varelas  · 15 Oct 2019  · 477pp  · 144,329 words

The Payoff

by Jeff Connaughton  · 202pp  · 66,742 words

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)

by Charles Wheelan  · 18 Apr 2010  · 386pp  · 122,595 words

The Global Money Markets

by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann and Moorad Choudhry  · 14 Jul 2002

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders

by Connie Bruck  · 1 Jun 1989  · 507pp  · 145,878 words

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value

by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen  · 30 Dec 2014  · 252pp  · 70,424 words

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems

by Linda Yueh  · 4 Jun 2018  · 453pp  · 117,893 words

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet

by Brett Christophers  · 12 Mar 2024  · 557pp  · 154,324 words

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis

by Anatole Kaletsky  · 22 Jun 2010  · 484pp  · 136,735 words

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

by Chris Hedges  · 12 Jul 2009  · 373pp  · 80,248 words

Bad Company

by Megan Greenwell  · 18 Apr 2025  · 385pp  · 103,818 words

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

by Emanuel Derman  · 1 Jan 2004  · 313pp  · 101,403 words

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism

by Kevin Phillips  · 31 Mar 2008  · 422pp  · 113,830 words

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World

by Sandra Navidi  · 24 Jan 2017  · 831pp  · 98,409 words

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

by Mohamed A. El-Erian  · 26 Jan 2016  · 318pp  · 77,223 words

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today

by Linda Yueh  · 15 Mar 2018  · 374pp  · 113,126 words

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets

by Michael W. Covel  · 19 Mar 2007  · 467pp  · 154,960 words

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined

by Lasse Heje Pedersen  · 12 Apr 2015  · 504pp  · 139,137 words

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

by Peter Singer  · 3 Mar 2009  · 190pp  · 61,970 words

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy

by Iain Martin  · 11 Sep 2013  · 387pp  · 119,244 words

Madoff Talks: Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History

by Jim Campbell  · 26 Apr 2021  · 369pp  · 107,073 words

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis

by Jeanna Smialek  · 27 Feb 2023  · 601pp  · 135,202 words

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

by George Packer  · 4 Mar 2014  · 559pp  · 169,094 words

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

by James Owen Weatherall  · 2 Jan 2013  · 338pp  · 106,936 words

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market

by Scott Patterson  · 11 Jun 2012  · 356pp  · 105,533 words

Finance and the Good Society

by Robert J. Shiller  · 1 Jan 2012  · 288pp  · 16,556 words

The Global Minotaur

by Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason  · 4 Jul 2015  · 394pp  · 85,734 words

For the Love of Money: A Memoir

by Sam Polk  · 18 Jul 2016  · 247pp  · 74,612 words

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite

by Richard R. Lindsey and Barry Schachter  · 30 Jun 2007

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War

by Mike Scotti  · 14 May 2012  · 287pp  · 92,118 words

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life

by Ian Dunt  · 15 Oct 2020

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

by Raghuram Rajan  · 24 May 2010  · 358pp  · 106,729 words

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

by Dan Ariely  · 19 Feb 2007  · 383pp  · 108,266 words

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

by John Kay  · 30 Apr 2010  · 237pp  · 50,758 words

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal

by William D. Cohan  · 8 Apr 2014  · 1,061pp  · 341,217 words

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism

by Richard Brooks  · 23 Apr 2018  · 398pp  · 105,917 words

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs

by Guy Raz  · 14 Sep 2020  · 361pp  · 107,461 words

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

by Katharina Pistor  · 27 May 2019  · 316pp  · 117,228 words

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth

by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato  · 31 Jul 2016  · 370pp  · 102,823 words

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry

by Helaine Olen  · 27 Dec 2012  · 375pp  · 105,067 words

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry

by Steven Rattner  · 19 Sep 2010  · 394pp  · 124,743 words

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman

by Ken Auletta  · 28 Sep 2015  · 349pp  · 104,796 words

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund

by Anita Raghavan  · 4 Jun 2013  · 575pp  · 171,599 words

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future

by Mervyn King and John Kay  · 5 Mar 2020  · 807pp  · 154,435 words

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity

by Guy Hands  · 4 Nov 2021  · 341pp  · 107,933 words

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream

by Arianna Huffington  · 7 Sep 2010  · 300pp  · 78,475 words

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite

by Duff McDonald  · 24 Apr 2017  · 827pp  · 239,762 words

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class

by Jeff Faux  · 16 May 2012  · 364pp  · 99,613 words

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?

by John Kay  · 2 Sep 2015  · 478pp  · 126,416 words

Global Financial Crisis

by Noah Berlatsky  · 19 Feb 2010

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One

by Meghnad Desai  · 15 Feb 2015  · 270pp  · 73,485 words

Capitalism in America: A History

by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan  · 15 Oct 2018  · 585pp  · 151,239 words

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction

by David Enrich  · 18 Feb 2020  · 399pp  · 114,787 words

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline

by Russell Jones  · 15 Jan 2023  · 463pp  · 140,499 words

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy

by Richard Duncan  · 2 Apr 2012  · 248pp  · 57,419 words

You Are Not a Gadget

by Jaron Lanier  · 12 Jan 2010  · 224pp  · 64,156 words

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History

by David Enrich  · 21 Mar 2017  · 513pp  · 141,153 words

Buffett

by Roger Lowenstein  · 24 Jul 2013  · 612pp  · 179,328 words

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy

by James B Stewart and Rachel Abrams  · 14 Feb 2023  · 521pp  · 136,802 words

Investment: A History

by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing  · 19 Feb 2016

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

by John Lanchester  · 14 Dec 2009  · 322pp  · 77,341 words

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream

by R. Christopher Whalen  · 7 Dec 2010  · 488pp  · 144,145 words

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

by Kenneth Rogoff  · 27 Feb 2025  · 330pp  · 127,791 words

Risk Management in Trading

by Davis Edwards  · 10 Jul 2014

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

by Christopher Steiner  · 29 Aug 2012  · 317pp  · 84,400 words

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy  · 10 Nov 2009  · 244pp  · 76,192 words

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker  · 21 Oct 2013

USA Travel Guide

by Lonely, Planet

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess

by Turney Duff  · 3 Jun 2013  · 262pp  · 93,987 words

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager

by Lars Kroijer  · 26 Jul 2010  · 244pp  · 79,044 words

The Best Business Writing 2013

by Dean Starkman  · 1 Jan 2013  · 514pp  · 152,903 words

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them

by Joseph E. Stiglitz  · 15 Mar 2015  · 409pp  · 125,611 words

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

by William D. Cohan  · 25 Dec 2015  · 1,009pp  · 329,520 words

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist

by Mark Stevens  · 31 May 1993  · 414pp  · 108,413 words

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster

by Nick Timiraos  · 1 Mar 2022  · 357pp  · 107,984 words

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar  · 19 Oct 2017  · 416pp  · 106,532 words

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

by Chrystia Freeland  · 11 Oct 2012  · 481pp  · 120,693 words

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All

by Costas Lapavitsas  · 14 Aug 2013  · 554pp  · 158,687 words

Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals

by John Lefevre  · 4 Nov 2014  · 243pp  · 77,516 words

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge  · 27 Feb 2018  · 267pp  · 72,552 words

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy

by Daniel Gross  · 7 May 2012  · 391pp  · 97,018 words

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit

by William Keegan  · 24 Jan 2019  · 309pp  · 85,584 words

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle

by Scott Wapner  · 23 Apr 2018  · 302pp  · 80,287 words

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right

by Thomas Frank  · 16 Aug 2011  · 261pp  · 64,977 words

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception

by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller  · 21 Sep 2015  · 274pp  · 93,758 words

Principles of Corporate Finance

by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen  · 15 Feb 2014

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire

by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes  · 16 Mar 2021  · 362pp  · 116,497 words

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments

by Charles Goyette  · 29 Oct 2009  · 287pp  · 81,970 words

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

by Richard Heinberg  · 1 Jun 2011  · 372pp  · 107,587 words

The Permanent Portfolio

by Craig Rowland and J. M. Lawson  · 27 Aug 2012

Ethics in Investment Banking

by John N. Reynolds and Edmund Newell  · 8 Nov 2011  · 193pp  · 11,060 words

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

by Mark Blyth  · 24 Apr 2013  · 576pp  · 105,655 words

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders

by Kate Kelly  · 2 Jun 2014  · 289pp  · 77,532 words

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy

by Kevin Mellyn  · 18 Jun 2012  · 183pp  · 17,571 words

All the Money in the World

by Peter W. Bernstein  · 17 Dec 2008  · 538pp  · 147,612 words

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History

by Diana B. Henriques  · 18 Sep 2017  · 526pp  · 144,019 words

The Smartest Guys in the Room

by Bethany McLean  · 25 Nov 2013  · 778pp  · 233,096 words

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

by Anupreeta Das  · 12 Aug 2024  · 315pp  · 115,894 words

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker  · 14 Sep 2010  · 602pp  · 120,848 words

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino

by Jim McTague  · 1 Mar 2011  · 280pp  · 73,420 words

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

by Chris Hayes  · 11 Jun 2012  · 285pp  · 86,174 words

The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg)

by Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch  · 22 Nov 2016

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

by Robert Skidelsky  · 13 Nov 2018

Heads I Win, Tails I Win

by Spencer Jakab  · 21 Jun 2016  · 303pp  · 84,023 words

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism

by Jeff Gramm  · 23 Feb 2016  · 384pp  · 103,658 words

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 7 May 2024  · 470pp  · 158,007 words

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society

by David Wolman  · 14 Feb 2012  · 275pp  · 77,017 words

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence

by Stephen D. King  · 17 Jun 2013  · 324pp  · 90,253 words

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds

by Dominique Mielle  · 6 Sep 2021  · 195pp  · 63,455 words

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm

by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe  · 3 Oct 2022  · 689pp  · 134,457 words

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy

by David Gelles  · 30 May 2022  · 318pp  · 91,957 words

Money: The Unauthorized Biography

by Felix Martin  · 5 Jun 2013  · 357pp  · 110,017 words

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments

by Michael Batnick  · 21 May 2018  · 198pp  · 53,264 words

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

by Philip Coggan  · 6 Feb 2020  · 524pp  · 155,947 words

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

by Nicholas Lemann  · 9 Sep 2019  · 354pp  · 118,970 words

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

by Scott Patterson  · 5 Jun 2023  · 289pp  · 95,046 words

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

by Kurt Eichenwald  · 14 Mar 2005  · 992pp  · 292,389 words

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

by Richard D. Wolff  · 1 Oct 2012  · 165pp  · 48,594 words

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

by Jim Rasenberger  · 15 Mar 2004  · 397pp  · 114,841 words

How to Make a Few Billion Dollars

by Brad Jacobs  · 15 Feb 2024  · 168pp  · 46,127 words

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

by Rana Foroohar  · 16 May 2016  · 515pp  · 132,295 words

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

by James Rickards  · 7 Apr 2014  · 466pp  · 127,728 words

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist

by Ray C. Anderson  · 28 Mar 2011  · 412pp  · 113,782 words

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations

by Jacob Soll  · 28 Apr 2014  · 382pp  · 105,166 words

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

by Kashmir Hill  · 19 Sep 2023  · 487pp  · 124,008 words

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers

by Katherine Clarke  · 13 Jun 2023  · 454pp  · 127,319 words

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't

by Nate Silver  · 31 Aug 2012  · 829pp  · 186,976 words

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea

by James Livingston  · 15 Feb 2016  · 90pp  · 27,452 words

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration

by Kent E. Calder  · 28 Apr 2019

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants

by Bethany McLean  · 13 Sep 2015  · 160pp  · 6,876 words

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful

by Glenn Greenwald  · 11 Nov 2011  · 283pp  · 77,272 words

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy

by Frank Vogl  · 14 Jul 2021  · 265pp  · 80,510 words

Walk Away

by Douglas E. French  · 1 Mar 2011  · 93pp  · 24,584 words

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets

by David J. Leinweber  · 31 Dec 2008  · 402pp  · 110,972 words

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt

by Kwasi Kwarteng  · 12 May 2014  · 632pp  · 159,454 words

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

by Edward Chancellor  · 15 Aug 2022  · 829pp  · 187,394 words

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom

by Martin Jacques  · 12 Nov 2009  · 859pp  · 204,092 words

Market Sense and Nonsense

by Jack D. Schwager  · 5 Oct 2012  · 297pp  · 91,141 words

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

by Grace Blakeley  · 11 Mar 2024  · 371pp  · 137,268 words

The Post-American World: Release 2.0

by Fareed Zakaria  · 1 Jan 2008  · 344pp  · 93,858 words

The Narcissist Next Door

by Jeffrey Kluger  · 25 Aug 2014  · 295pp  · 89,280 words

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It

by Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan  · 15 Mar 2014  · 414pp  · 101,285 words

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope  · 17 Sep 2018  · 354pp  · 110,570 words

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

by Frank Pasquale  · 17 Nov 2014  · 320pp  · 87,853 words

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion

by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell  · 19 Jul 2021  · 460pp  · 130,820 words

Willful: How We Choose What We Do

by Richard Robb  · 12 Nov 2019  · 202pp  · 58,823 words

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It

by Alex Edmans  · 13 May 2024  · 315pp  · 87,035 words

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank

by John Tamny  · 30 Apr 2016  · 268pp  · 74,724 words

A Man for All Markets

by Edward O. Thorp  · 15 Nov 2016  · 505pp  · 142,118 words

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss

by Ron Adner  · 1 Mar 2012  · 265pp  · 70,788 words

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It

by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik and David Pitt-Watson  · 30 Apr 2016  · 304pp  · 80,965 words

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees

by Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon  · 2 Mar 2010  · 613pp  · 181,605 words

The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire

by Keach Hagey  · 25 Jun 2018  · 499pp  · 131,113 words

That Used to Be Us

by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum  · 1 Sep 2011  · 441pp  · 136,954 words

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization

by Jeff Rubin  · 19 May 2009  · 258pp  · 83,303 words

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

by Robert Scheer  · 14 Apr 2010  · 257pp  · 64,763 words

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud

by Jack Ewing  · 22 May 2017  · 434pp  · 114,583 words

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

by William Quinn and John D. Turner  · 5 Aug 2020  · 297pp  · 108,353 words

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

by Rob Copeland  · 7 Nov 2023  · 412pp  · 122,655 words

The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

by Ernest Scheyder  · 30 Jan 2024  · 355pp  · 133,726 words

The End of Growth

by Jeff Rubin  · 2 Sep 2013  · 262pp  · 83,548 words

Dead Companies Walking

by Scott Fearon  · 10 Nov 2014  · 232pp  · 71,965 words

The Rough Guide to New York City

by Rough Guides  · 21 May 2018

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

Take the Money and Run: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the Demise of American Prosperity

by Eric C. Anderson  · 15 Jan 2009  · 264pp  · 115,489 words

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market

by Daniel Reingold and Jennifer Reingold  · 1 Jan 2006  · 506pp  · 146,607 words

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics

by Nicholas Wapshott  · 10 Oct 2011  · 494pp  · 132,975 words

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century

by George Gilder  · 30 Apr 1981  · 590pp  · 153,208 words

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors

by Edward Niedermeyer  · 14 Sep 2019  · 328pp  · 90,677 words

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future

by Joseph C. Sternberg  · 13 May 2019  · 336pp  · 95,773 words

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

The Firm

by Duff McDonald  · 1 Jun 2014  · 654pp  · 120,154 words

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives

by Satyajit Das  · 15 Nov 2006  · 349pp  · 134,041 words

The New Sell and Sell Short: How to Take Profits, Cut Losses, and Benefit From Price Declines

by Alexander Elder  · 1 Jan 2008  · 394pp  · 85,252 words

file:///C:/Documents%20and%...

by vpavan

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

by Kurt Andersen  · 14 Sep 2020  · 486pp  · 150,849 words

Gambling Man

by Lionel Barber  · 3 Oct 2024  · 424pp  · 123,730 words

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy

by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale  · 23 May 2011  · 397pp  · 112,034 words

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive

by Dean Baker  · 1 Jan 2011  · 172pp  · 54,066 words

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump

by James Naughtie  · 1 Apr 2020

Python for Data Analysis

by Wes McKinney  · 30 Dec 2011  · 752pp  · 131,533 words

Getting a Job in Hedge Funds: An Inside Look at How Funds Hire

by Adam Zoia and Aaron Finkel  · 8 Feb 2008  · 192pp  · 75,440 words

Security Analysis

by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd  · 1 Jan 1962  · 1,042pp  · 266,547 words

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

by Roger Lowenstein  · 19 Oct 2015  · 589pp  · 128,484 words

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory

by Andrew J. Bacevich  · 7 Jan 2020  · 254pp  · 68,133 words

Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich?

by Charles Raw, Bruce Page and Godfrey Hodgson  · 16 May 2005  · 552pp  · 169,398 words

Inequality and the 1%

by Danny Dorling  · 6 Oct 2014  · 317pp  · 71,776 words

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

by Ron Chernow  · 1 Jan 1990  · 1,335pp  · 336,772 words

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market

by Leah McGrath Goodman  · 15 Feb 2011  · 553pp  · 168,111 words

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy

by George Magnus  · 10 Sep 2018  · 371pp  · 98,534 words

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

by David G. Blanchflower  · 12 Apr 2021  · 566pp  · 160,453 words

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy

by Christopher Leonard  · 11 Jan 2022  · 416pp  · 124,469 words

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney  · 7 Mar 2017  · 526pp  · 160,601 words

Stigum's Money Market, 4E

by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi  · 9 Feb 2007  · 1,202pp  · 424,886 words

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas

by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau  · 3 Aug 2016  · 586pp  · 160,321 words

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives

by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez  · 5 Jan 2010  · 269pp  · 104,430 words

Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide

by Martin S. Fridson and Fernando Alvarez  · 31 May 2011

Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython

by Wes McKinney  · 25 Sep 2017  · 1,829pp  · 135,521 words

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies

by Nik Bhatia  · 18 Jan 2021

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

by Joseph E. Stiglitz  · 10 Jun 2012  · 580pp  · 168,476 words

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz  · 7 Jun 2010  · 486pp  · 148,485 words

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor

by Andy Kessler  · 12 Oct 2009  · 361pp  · 86,921 words

High-Frequency Trading

by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado and Maureen O'Hara  · 28 Sep 2013

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions

by Elizabeth Ghaffari  · 5 Dec 2011  · 493pp  · 139,845 words

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George  · 7 Jan 2014  · 335pp  · 104,850 words

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters

by Gregory Zuckerman  · 5 Nov 2013  · 483pp  · 143,123 words

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think

by Luke Johnson  · 31 Aug 2011  · 166pp  · 49,639 words

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner  · 4 May 2015  · 306pp  · 85,836 words

Cable Cowboy

by Mark Robichaux  · 19 Oct 2002

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World

by Adam Lebor  · 28 May 2013  · 438pp  · 109,306 words

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston  · 14 Aug 2008  · 468pp  · 233,091 words

Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business

by Ernie Chan  · 17 Nov 2008

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter)

by Golden Krishna  · 10 Feb 2015  · 271pp  · 62,538 words

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge  · 4 Mar 2003  · 196pp  · 57,974 words

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs

by Andy Kessler  · 1 Feb 2011  · 272pp  · 64,626 words

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America

by Sam Roberts  · 22 Jan 2013  · 219pp  · 67,173 words

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future

by Levi Tillemann  · 20 Jan 2015  · 431pp  · 107,868 words

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

by William Poundstone  · 18 Sep 2006  · 389pp  · 109,207 words

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party

by David Kogan  · 17 Apr 2019  · 458pp  · 136,405 words

Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs

by Jamie Fiore Higgins  · 29 Aug 2022  · 263pp  · 86,709 words

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

by Leslie Berlin  · 7 Nov 2017  · 615pp  · 168,775 words

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna  · 23 May 2016  · 437pp  · 113,173 words

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

by Andrew Yang  · 2 Apr 2018  · 300pp  · 76,638 words

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge  · 25 Apr 2023  · 541pp  · 173,676 words

Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World

by J. Doyne Farmer  · 24 Apr 2024  · 406pp  · 114,438 words

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

by Gregory Zuckerman  · 5 Nov 2019  · 407pp  · 104,622 words

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis

by Benjamin Kunkel  · 11 Mar 2014  · 142pp  · 45,733 words

Mastering Private Equity

by Zeisberger, Claudia,Prahl, Michael,White, Bowen, Michael Prahl and Bowen White  · 15 Jun 2017

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing

by Lisa Gansky  · 14 Oct 2010  · 215pp  · 55,212 words

The Lights in the Tunnel

by Martin Ford  · 28 May 2011  · 261pp  · 10,785 words

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer

by Duncan J. Watts  · 28 Mar 2011  · 327pp  · 103,336 words

Hopes and Prospects

by Noam Chomsky  · 1 Jan 2009

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

by Satyajit Das  · 9 Feb 2016  · 327pp  · 90,542 words

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff  · 2 May 2010

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal

by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz  · 20 Jul 2020  · 520pp  · 134,627 words

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World

by Bethany McLean  · 10 Sep 2018

End the Fed

by Ron Paul  · 5 Feb 2011

The New Science of Asset Allocation: Risk Management in a Multi-Asset World

by Thomas Schneeweis, Garry B. Crowder and Hossein Kazemi  · 8 Mar 2010  · 317pp  · 106,130 words

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

by Joyce Appleby  · 22 Dec 2009  · 540pp  · 168,921 words

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

by Thomas Geoghegan  · 20 Sep 2011  · 364pp  · 104,697 words

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely  · 31 May 2010  · 324pp  · 93,175 words

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America

by Dan Conway  · 8 Sep 2019  · 218pp  · 68,648 words

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building

by Michael Gross  · 18 Dec 2007  · 601pp  · 193,225 words

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland

by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham  · 10 Jan 2023  · 498pp  · 184,761 words

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone  · 14 Oct 2013  · 380pp  · 118,675 words

The Trouble With Billionaires

by Linda McQuaig  · 1 May 2013  · 261pp  · 81,802 words

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

by Sarah Kendzior  · 6 Apr 2020

Jared Bibler

by Iceland's Secret The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Con-Harriman House (2021)

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 1 Jun 2009  · 422pp  · 131,666 words

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton

by Colin Read  · 16 Jul 2012  · 206pp  · 70,924 words

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality

by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels and Chris Wimer  · 29 Oct 2010  · 237pp  · 72,716 words

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

by Jamie K. McCallum  · 15 Nov 2022  · 349pp  · 99,230 words

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis

by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee and Kevin Coldiron  · 13 Dec 2019  · 241pp  · 81,805 words

The Little Book of Hedge Funds

by Anthony Scaramucci  · 30 Apr 2012  · 162pp  · 50,108 words

The Irrational Bundle

by Dan Ariely  · 3 Apr 2013  · 898pp  · 266,274 words

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street

by Aaron Brown and Eric Kim  · 10 Oct 2011  · 483pp  · 141,836 words

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

by Henry Jenkins  · 31 Jul 2006

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI

by Carissa Véliz  · 21 Apr 2026  · 503pp  · 129,255 words

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

by Maria Konnikova  · 28 Jan 2016  · 384pp  · 118,572 words

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs

by Gina Keating  · 10 Oct 2012  · 347pp  · 91,318 words

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It

by Timothy Noah  · 23 Apr 2012  · 309pp  · 91,581 words

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 5 Oct 2015  · 424pp  · 121,425 words

Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio  · 18 Sep 2017  · 516pp  · 157,437 words

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices

by Robert McNally  · 17 Jan 2017  · 436pp  · 114,278 words

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them

by Christopher W Mayer  · 21 May 2018

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything

by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran  · 14 Jul 2021  · 326pp  · 91,532 words

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them

by Nouriel Roubini  · 17 Oct 2022  · 328pp  · 96,678 words

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

by J. Bradford Delong  · 6 Apr 2020  · 593pp  · 183,240 words

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide

by Ha-Joon Chang  · 26 May 2014  · 385pp  · 111,807 words

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State

by Paul Tucker  · 21 Apr 2018  · 920pp  · 233,102 words

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy

by Dani Rodrik  · 23 Dec 2010  · 356pp  · 103,944 words

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime

by Julian Guthrie  · 15 Nov 2019

DIY Investor: How to Take Control of Your Investments & Plan for a Financially Secure Future

by Andy Bell  · 12 Sep 2013  · 348pp  · 82,499 words

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing

by Niels Jensen  · 25 Mar 2018  · 205pp  · 55,435 words

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

by Michael Sandel  · 26 Apr 2012  · 231pp  · 70,274 words

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris  · 14 Feb 2023  · 864pp  · 272,918 words

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck  · 2 Sep 2024  · 715pp  · 212,449 words

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

by Nicholas Wapshott  · 2 Aug 2021  · 453pp  · 122,586 words

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going

by George Friedman  · 25 Jan 2011  · 249pp  · 79,740 words

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research

by Michael Shearn  · 8 Nov 2011  · 400pp  · 124,678 words

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS

by David France  · 29 Nov 2016

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever

by Robin Wigglesworth  · 11 Oct 2021  · 432pp  · 106,612 words

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing

by Burton G. Malkiel  · 10 Jan 2011  · 416pp  · 118,592 words

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy

by Gregory Brandon Salsbury  · 15 Mar 2010  · 261pp  · 70,584 words

Adam Smith: Father of Economics

by Jesse Norman  · 30 Jun 2018

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy

by Linsey McGoey  · 14 Apr 2015  · 324pp  · 93,606 words

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership

by Andro Linklater  · 12 Nov 2013  · 603pp  · 182,826 words

Aerotropolis

by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay  · 2 Jan 2009  · 603pp  · 182,781 words

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance

by Eswar S. Prasad  · 27 Sep 2021  · 661pp  · 185,701 words

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles

by Michael Gross  · 1 Nov 2011  · 613pp  · 200,826 words

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

by Bhu Srinivasan  · 25 Sep 2017  · 801pp  · 209,348 words

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms

by Russell Napier  · 18 Jan 2016  · 358pp  · 119,272 words

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom

by Tony Robbins  · 18 Nov 2014  · 825pp  · 228,141 words

Eastern USA

by Lonely Planet

All About Asset Allocation, Second Edition

by Richard Ferri  · 11 Jul 2010

Hedgehogging

by Barton Biggs  · 3 Jan 2005

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice

by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi  · 16 Oct 2017  · 1,544pp  · 391,691 words