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Author: Lawrence G. McDonald
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307588351
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers—right from the belly of the beast. In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald’s Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts “gateway to nowhere” housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world’s toughest trading floors. We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation’ s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it. The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America’s—and the world’s—financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.
Author: Lawrence G. McDonald
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307588351
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Get Book Here
Book Description
One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers—right from the belly of the beast. In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald’s Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts “gateway to nowhere” housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world’s toughest trading floors. We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation’ s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it. The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America’s—and the world’s—financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.
Author: Larry McDonald
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407030671
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
When Lehman Brothers bank went under, the world gasped. One of the world's biggest and most successful banks, its downfall was the event that sparked the slide of the world economy toward a Great Depression II. This is the gripping inside story of the dark characters who ruled Lehman, who refused to heed warnings that the company was headed for an iceberg; the world-class, mid-level people who valiantly fought to get Lehman off its disastrous course; the crash that didn't have to happen. A news-breaking explanation that answers the question everyone still asks: "why did it happen?" Larry McDonald, a former vice-president at Lehman Brothers in charge of distressed debt trading and convertible securities, was right at the centre of the meltdown of the company and gives an intimate look at the madhouse that Lehman became. This book shows beyond a doubt that Richard Fuld, the long-time CEO of Lehman, and his top executives, were totally out to lunch, allowing Lehman's risk profile to reach gargantuan proportions. While the traders, like Larry McDonald, clearly predicted more than two years in advance that the market for packaged subprime mortgages and credit default swaps would evaporate, the high-flying Lehman bosses pushed hard on the gas pedal until the very end.
Author: Lawrence G. McDonald
Publisher: Crown Pub
ISBN: 0307588335
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
A former vice president of Lehman Brothers explains the financial collapse of the securities giant in 2008, what led to the financial crisis, and who had been responsible for its downfall.
Author: Greg Farrell
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307717879
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
The intimate, fly-on-the wall tale of the decline and fall of an America icon With one notable exception, the firms that make up what we know as Wall Street have always been part of an inbred, insular culture that most people only vaguely understand. The exception was Merrill Lynch, a firm that revolutionized the stock market by bringing Wall Street to Main Street, setting up offices in far-flung cities and towns long ignored by the giants of finance. With its “thundering herd” of financial advisers, perhaps no other business, whether in financial services or elsewhere, so epitomized the American spirit. Merrill Lynch was not only “bullish on America,” it was a big reason why so many average Americans were able to grow wealthy by investing in the stock market. Merrill Lynch was an icon. Its sudden decline, collapse, and sale to Bank of America was a shock. How did it happen? Why did it happen? And what does this story of greed, hubris, and incompetence tell us about the culture of Wall Street that continues to this day even though it came close to destroying the American economy? A culture in which the CEO of a firm losing $28 billion pushes hard to be paid a $25 million bonus. A culture in which two Merrill Lynch executives are guaranteed bonuses of $30 million and $40 million for four months’ work, even while the firm is struggling to reduce its losses by firing thousands of employees. Based on unparalleled sources at both Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, Greg Farrell’s Crash of the Titans is a Shakespearean saga of three flawed masters of the universe. E. Stanley O’Neal, whose inspiring rise from the segregated South to the corner office of Merrill Lynch—where he engineered a successful turnaround—was undone by his belief that a smooth-talking salesman could handle one of the most difficult jobs on Wall Street. Because he enjoyed O’Neal’s support, this executive was allowed to build up an astonishing $30 billion position in CDOs on the firm’s balance sheet, at a time when all other Wall Street firms were desperately trying to exit the business. After O’Neal comes John Thain, the cerebral, MIT-educated technocrat whose rescue of the New York Stock Exchange earned him the nickname “Super Thain.” He was hired to save Merrill Lynch in late 2007, but his belief that the markets would rebound led him to underestimate the depth of Merrill’s problems. Finally, we meet Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, a street fighter raised barely above the poverty line in rural Georgia, whose “my way or the highway” management style suffers fools more easily than potential rivals, and who made a $50 billion commitment over a September weekend to buy a business he really didn’t understand, thus jeopardizing his own institution. The merger itself turns out to be a bizarre combination of cultures that blend like oil and water, where slick Wall Street bankers suddenly find themselves reporting to a cast of characters straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies. BofA’s inbred culture, which perceived New York banks its enemies, was based on loyalty and a good-ol’-boy network in which competence played second fiddle to blind obedience. Crash of the Titans is a financial thriller that puts you in the theater as the historic events of the financial crisis unfold and people responsible for billion of dollars of other people’s money gamble recklessly to enhance their power and their paychecks or to save their own skins. Its wealth of never-before-revealed information and focus on two icons of corporate America make it the book that puts together all the pieces of the Wall Street disaster.
Author: Bethany McLean
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101551054
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
Hailed as "the best business book of 2010" (Huffington Post), this New York Times bestseller about the 2008 financial crisis brings the devastation of the Great Recession to life. As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home buyers? According to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, two of America's most acclaimed business journalists, many devils helped bring hell to the economy. All the Devils Are Here goes back several decades to weave the hidden history of the financial crisis in a way no previous book has done. It explores the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. It delves into the powerful American mythology of homeownership. And it proves that the crisis ultimately wasn't about finance at all; it was about human nature. Just as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered for finally making sense of the financial meltdown and its consequences.
Author: Kate Kelly
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781591842736
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Examines the company's final weekend as an independent firm and the corporate culture that led to the fall of one of Wall Street's biggest names.
Author: Scott E.D. Skyrm
Publisher: ibooks
ISBN: 1883283353
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
“Skyrm makes complex financial scenarios accessible to all interested readers in an informative and entertaining manner. We can all learn something from this book.” —Thomas Peterffy, Chairman, CEO, and President of Interactive Brokers “Skyrm put together the story of MF Global like no one else could in providing the ultimate autopsy covering destructive financial engineering that’s played such a big role in our capital markets.” —Lawrence G. McDonald, New York Times best selling author of A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE “God is in the details...first come the reporters, then the lawyers. Skyrm’s book is the necessary antidote. Only someone who has ‘done’ it can explain it. Perhaps the best ‘counterfactual’ rationale for reading The Money Noose: If John Corzine had been able to before, there would likely have been no after.” —Stan Jonas, Managing Partner, Axiom Management Partners In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. MF Global was bankrupt less than a year after the law’s passage. THE MONEY NOOSE is a general accounting of the facts that led to MF Global’s collapse, as well as the story of the major players involved. It is a chaotic story, one in which individual actions taken in and of themselves are relatively minor. But the sum of those individual actions equal the same end result. This book is designed to tell the story of MF Global, what went wrong and how things came to an abrupt end. In those regards, it’s an incredible story.
Author: Kirsten Grind
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451617933
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Based on reporting for which the author was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award, this book traces the rise and spectacular fall of Washington Mutual.
Author: Alan C. (Ace) Greenberg
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439109737
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Former CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Greenberg, sheds light on his life as one of Wall Street’s most respected figures in this candid and fascinating account of a storied career and its stunning conclusion. On March 16, 2008, Alan Greenberg, former CEO and current chairman of the executive committee of Bear Stearns, found himself in the company’s offices on a Sunday. More remarkable by far than the fact that he was in the office on a Sunday is what he was doing: participating in a meeting of the board of directors to discuss selling the company he had worked decades to build for a fraction of what it had been worth as little as ten days earlier. In less than a week the value of Bear Stearns had diminished by tens of billions of dollars. As Greenberg recalls, "our most unassailable assumption—that Bear Stearns, an independent investment firm with a proud eighty-five-year history, would be in business tomorrow—had been extinguished. . . . What was it, exactly, that had happened, and how, and why?" This book provides answers to those questions from one of Wall Street’s most respected figures, the man most closely identified with Bear Stearns’ decades of success. The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns is Alan Greenberg’s remarkable story of ascending to the top of one of Wall Street’s venerable powerhouse financial institutions. After joining Bear Stearns in 1949, Greenberg rose to become formally head of the firm in 1978. No one knows the history of Bear Stearns as he does; no one participated in more key decisions, right into the company’s final days. Greenberg offers an honest, clear-eyed assessment of how the collapse of the company surprised him and other top executives, and he explains who he thinks was responsible.
Author: Oonagh McDonald
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526100509
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) open access license. Using extensive documentary evidence and interviews with former Lehman employees, Oonagh McDonald reveals the decisions that led to Lehman’s collapse, investigates why the government refused a bail-out and whether the implications of this refusal were fully understood. In clear and accessible language she demonstrates both the short and long term effects of Lehman’s collapse.
