About the author:
William David Cohan is an American business writer. He has written three books about business and economics and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Prior to becoming a journalist, he worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch & Co., and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. (Source: Wikipedia.org)
House of Cards describes in particular the complicated series of events that led to the downfall of Bear Sterns in March 2008. Its actual appeal, however, deduces from its complete and careful analysis of the history of the firm since its origination as an upstart brokerage firm in 1923 and a gripping account of the demise of Bear Sterns in 2007. This failure prognosticated a lot of issues that would eventually stultify the firm, and the author puts forward that its deviation from various historical operating practices led to its ultimate sale to JPMorgan Chase at $10 per share, down from over $170 just a year earlier.
Cohan, also the author of “The Last Tycoons,” a 2007 book about Lazard Frères & Company, gives us in this book a shuddery, almost microscopic account of the 10, vertigo inducing days that disclosed Bear Stearns to be a fragile house of cards in a perfect storm.
Why I choose this book?
The collection of private, commercially oriented organizations, ranging in size from sole proprietorships to large corporations is referred to as
In the book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho describes the culture of Wall Street. Karen Ho is an American anthropologist, who earned her undergrad and graduate degrees from Stanford University and got her Ph.D. in anthropology from Princeton University. In 1997, during the middle of Ho’s Princeton education, she took a leave of absence to work in lower Manhattan and observe the natural habitat for investment banking. Bankers Trust New York Corporation (also known as BT) hired Ho to be part of the Management Consulting Group. After six months, Ho was fired due to downsizing. Based on Ho’s stint at BT in 1997, fieldwork from 1998 to 1999 and over 100 interviews with investment bankers, Ho depicts an insider’s account of how
Boy wanted Leola to be something she could not. Leola tried hard to suit his
Q1 – What was up with Wall Street? The Goldman Standard and Shades of Gray.
The financial industry had gone to several crises through the decades. Around 2008, Alex Preston notice that the investments banking industry was in a crisis. Big banks were closing its doors or selling out to other companies. As it was the case of the National City Corp.; the first ever American’s mortgage maker had to close its doors after taking a large amount of proprietary risk. Other big financial companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to avoid having to go down the same way, became bank holding companies, which means that these companies could receive emergency federal funds.
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was one of many books to be published in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2007. After seeing the global economy stall in the face of massive losses in word financial markets, many Americans sought to better understand the crisis and its causes. This book, written from the perspective of a financial market insider, provides a glimpse into the world of global finance and also seeks to explain how the players in this world were involved in the crisis. In the words of the author Lawrence McDonald, “My objective in writing A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was twofold. First, to provide … a close-up, inside view of how markets really work…..And, second, to give… as crystal clear an explanation as possible about the real reasons why the legendary Lehman Brothers met with such a swift end”1. By writing about his personal experience at Lehman Brothers and recounting stories from within the famous investment banking firm, Mr. McDonald largely succeeds at his first goal. However, the elements of personal biography and the chronological order of the book make it difficult for the reader to fully appreciate all of the varied causes of the financial crash. I believe that the main value of reading this book is in understanding these causes, with Lehman Brothers acting as a microcosm of the greater financial universe. As such, in this review I have isolated elements from Mr. McDonald’s book which highlight how the crisis
Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis, is a book that thoroughly looks into the author’s life as a broker on Wall Street working for Salomon Brothers, the most profitable firm in the 1980’s. Michael Lewis graduated from The London School of Economics and decided to take his career into trading when offered a job by the top- trading firm. At this time, the mortgage market started booming, and money was flowing all over Wall Street.
During the times leading up to the power struggle, the power dynamic within Lehman was steadily shifting as trading profits became increasingly more important to Lehman versus traditional investment banking profits. Thus, Glucksman was able to step into the spot light and Peterson became more expendable. Peter Peterson’s core
Hence, the leadership style of Reed Hastings is extremely important for the purpose of this report and will be the key focus of the research as well. In the beginning of the year 2005, the analysts of Wedbush Securities Stock had place a price targeting at 3 dollars, the trading of which was being done at the price of approximately 11 dollars (Loftus
““The name of the game, moving money from your clients pocket to your pocket”, Mark stated. “But if you can make your clients money at the same time it’s advantageous to everyone, correct?” “No, Mark replied…Okay, first rule of Wall Street-nobody and I don’t care if you are Warren Buffet or Jimmy Buffet- knows if a stock is going up, down or sideways, least of all stock brokers. But we have to pretend we know.”” (8)
In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)
The ‘sub-prime’ crisis triggered by the meltdown of the US mortgage backed-securities market in 2007 was a precursor to the global financial crisis. It would drastically change the competitive landscape for all firms in the financial services sector, including Campbell and Bailyn (C&B), one of the world’s five largest investment banks.
At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, Mr. Lawrence G. McDonald wrote a book on the fall of Lehman Brothers, entitled "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense." This book is a risk manager 's guide to the right and wrong moves on Wall St., and explains why investors must stay ahead of policies coming out
Large corporations such as Wal-Mart or Home Depot often come under criticism for putting mom-and-pop shops out of business. While this may be a valid criticism, the consumers neglect to realize that they play the biggest part in shutting these businesses down. Consumers across the country are always looking for the best deals or the lowest prices, and in most cases the larger corporations are where products can be found at the lowest price. Many small business owners and the populations of small towns dislike large corporations moving into the area because they believe it negatively effects the local
'The Wolf of the Wall Street', written by Jordan Belfort, is a high end structured novel which purely embarks the reader onto a journey exploring one's destined route to social statistic success as well as rotten failure. Self-discovery can possibly conclude to radical reinforcements of amorality, revolting and great human attributes. The story of Jordan Belfort primarily explored these multifaceted concepts through two core values of trust and loyalty. With the benefits of using third person perspective, Belfort can exemplify his past through strong subsidisation of literacy techniques used throughout his novel. Conclusively, Jordan Belfort uses the narration to give his audience a brief insight to his ongoing self-discovery.