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

A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis.

At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world's oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. After ten days, the bank no longer existed, its assets sold under duress to rival JPMorgan Chase. The effects would be felt nationwide, as the country suddenly found itself in the grip of the worst financial mess since the Great Depression. William Cohan exposes the corporate arrogance, power struggles, and deadly combination of greed and inattention, which led to the collapse of not only Bear Stearns but the very foundations of Wall Street.

WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former senior Wall Street investment banker, is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is an online columnist for The New York Times, and writes frequently for Vanity Fair, Fortune, ArtNews, The Financial Times, the Washington Post and the Daily Beast. He also appears frequently on CNN, Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and also on numerous NPR shows.