The Tsunami That Buried a Wall Street Giant

Book Review By: Michiko Kakutani
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
NYT-The Arts, C4

This article is about the book “House of Cards” written by William D. Cohan, a former investment banker who is also author of “The Last Tycoons,” a 2007 book based on Lazard Freres & Company. The lede gives a little history of Bear Stearns, and what the book is about. The nation’s fifth largest investment bank that survived every crisis in the 20th century, never losing a quarter, now crashed and burned during these economic times, and what led to its downfall.

Kakutani then says what the book mentions, “As William D. Cohan makes clear in his engrossing new book, ‘House of Cards,’ Bear Stearns is also a kind of microcosm of what went wrong on Wall Street--from bad business decisions to a lack of oversight to greedy, arrogant C.E.O‘s--and a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end.” He then goes into a small paragraph about the author and his past works.

This article has no “but” statement because it is a book review. I am not sure what is the format for a book review, but this one gets me interested in the book, and summarizes it in a way that doesn’t get me confused, because the book is about the economy, which I never understand.

Kakutani points out two things Cohan talks about in his book. The first one has to do with Wall Street and how they are worried about the possibility the domino effect will happen in the financial markets. The second is the butterfly effect, which sounds very interesting. “…the flapping of a tiny butterfly‘s wings can lead to a gigantic storm in a globalized, interconnection world, where rumors fly around the planet by television and the Internet…”

This review ends with the effect the book can have to readers: “Mr. Cohan‘s account of its death spiral not only makes it riveting, edge-of-the seat- reading, but it also stands as a chilling cautionary tale about how greed and hubris and high risk gambling wrecked one company, and turned it into a metaphor for what the author calls ‘the near collapse of capitalism as we have known it.’”