Editorial Reviews
Review
"Engrossing....[Cohan] gives us in these pages a chilling, almost minute-by-minute account of the 10, vertigo-inducing days that one year ago revealed Bear Stearns to be a flimsy house of cards in a perfect storm....He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping — and almost immediately comprehensible — to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading"
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders" --BusinessWeek
"Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." -- Los Angeles Times
"A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM)." -- The Economist
"A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion--a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today....meticulous reporting.....first drafts of history don't get much better than this" --Bloomberg
Product Description
On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”
This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.
Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.
How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.
Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.
But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.
The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).
Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.
Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.
About the Author
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 writes for The Financial Times, Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and appears frequently on CNBC.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The first murmurings of impending doom for the financial world originated 2,500 miles from Wall Street in an unassuming office suite just north of Orlando, Florida. There, hard by the train tracks, Bennet Sedacca announced to the world at 10:15 on the morning of March 5, 2008, that venerable Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth--largest investment bank, was in trouble, big trouble. “Yep,” Sedacca wrote on the Minyanville Web site, which is dedicated to helping investors comprehend the financial world. “The great credit unwind is upon us. Credit default swaps on all brokers, particularly Lehman and Bear Stearns, are blowing out, big time.”
Sedacca, the forty--eight--year--old president of Atlantic Advisors, a $3.5 billion investment management company and hedge fund, had been watching his Bloomberg screens on a daily basis as the cost of insuring the short--term obligations–known in Wall Street argot as “credit default swaps”–of both Lehman and Bear Stearns had increased steadily since the summer of 2007 and then more rapidly in February 2008. Now he was calling the end of the credit party that had been raging on Wall Street for six years. “I’ve been talking about it for years,” Sedacca said later. “But I started to notice it that fall. Because if you think about it, if you have all this nuclear waste on your balance sheet, what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to cut your dividends, you’re supposed to raise equity, and you’re supposed to shrink your balance sheet. And they did just the opposite. They took on more leverage. Lehman went from twenty--five to thirty--five times leveraged in one year. And then they announce a big stock buyback at $65 a share and they sell stock at $38 a share. I mean, they don’t know what they’re doing. And yet they get rewarded for doing that. It makes me sick.”
Sedacca had witnessed firsthand a few blowups in his day. He worked at the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert–the former home of junk--bond king Michael Milken–when it was liquidated in 1990 and lost virtually overnight the stock he had in the firm as it plunged from $110 per share to zero (Drexel was a private company but the stock had been valued for internal purposes). “It was enough that it stunned,” he explained. “It was more than a twenty--nine--year--old would want to lose.” Many of his Drexel colleagues had taken out loans from Citibank to buy the Drexel stock and were left with their bank loans and worthless stock. “I know people with millions and millions of dollars of debt and the stock was at zero,” he said. They either paid off the loans or declared personal bankruptcy. “That’s what happens when everyone turns off your funding,” he added.
He then moved on to Kidder Peabody and watched that 130--year--old firm disintegrate, too. As a result of these experiences and those at other Wall Street firms, he had developed a healthy skepticism of both debt and the ways of Wall Street. Starting in the summer of 2007, he began to feel certain that the mountain of debt building across many sectors of the American economy would not come to a good end. He started betting against credit. “I’ve watched enough screens long enough to know something was wrong,” he said.
The problem at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, Sedacca informed his clients and Minyanville readers, was that both firms had huge inventories on their balance sheets of securities backed by home mortgages. The rate of default on these mortgages, while still small, was growing at the same time that the value of the underlying collateral for the mortgage–people’s homes–was falling rapidly. Sedacca could not help noticing that the effects of this double whammy were beginning to show up in other, smaller companies involved in the mortgage industry. He could watch the noose tighten in the credit markets. “Look at what is happening to Thornburg Mortgage,” he wrote, referring to the publicly traded home mortgage lender, which specialized in making what were known as “Alt--A” mortgages, those greater than $417,000, to wealthy borrowers. Thornburg had been “overwhelmed” by margin calls from its lenders. “It supposedly only has a 0.44% default rate on its [$24.7 billion] mortgage portfolio that it services but the bonds it owns are getting pounded. Result? Margin call. The worst part is that the company went to sell some bonds to settle the margin calls but couldn’t. The ultimate Roach Motel.”
That Thornburg, based in Sante Fe, New Mexico, appeared to be hitting the wall was somewhat surprising considering its customers’ low default rate and high credit quality. The problem at Thornburg was not that its customers could no longer pay the interest and principal on their mortgages; the problem was that the company could no longer fund its business on a day--to--day basis. Thornburg had a liquidity problem because its lenders no longer liked the collateral–those jumbo mortgages–Thornburg used to obtain financing.
Unlike a bank, which is able to use the cash from its depositors to fund most of its operations, financial institutions such as Thornburg as well as pure investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had no depositors’ money to use. Instead they funded their operations in a few ways: either by occasionally issuing long--term securities, such as debt or preferred stock, or most often by obtaining short--term, often overnight, borrowings in the unsecured commercial paper market or in the overnight “repo” market, where the borrowings are secured by the various securities and other assets on their balance sheets. These fairly routine borrowings have been repeated day after day for some thirty years and worked splendidly–until there was perceived to be a problem with either the securities or the institutions backing them up, and then the funding evaporated like rain in the Sahara. The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms–Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns–was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty--four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day--to--day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms’ ongoing reputation in the marketplace.
Thornburg financed its operations very similarly to the way investment banks did. But in mid--February 2008, Thornburg was having a very difficult time managing its perception in the marketplace because its short--term borrowings were backed by the mortgages it held on its balance sheet. Some of these mortgages were prime mortgages, money lent to the lowest--risk borrowers, and some were those Alt--A mortgages, which were marginally riskier than prime mortgages and offered investors higher yields. At Thornburg, 99.56 percent of these mortgages were performing just fine.
But that did not matter. What mattered was that the perception of these mortgage--related assets in the market was deteriorating rapidly. That perception spelled potential doom for firms such as Thornburg, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, which financed their businesses in the overnight repo market using mortgage--related assets as collateral.
For Thornburg the trouble began on February 14, halfway around the world, when UBS, the largest Swiss bank, reported a fourth--quarter 2007 loss of $11.3 billion after writing off $13.7 billion of investments in U.S. mortgages. Amid this huge write--off, UBS said it had lost $2 billion on Alt--A mortgages and, worse, that it had an additional exposure of $26.6 billion to them. In a letter to shareholders before he lost his job on April 1, Marcel Ospel, UBS’s longtime chairman, wrote that the year 2007 had been “one of the most difficult in our history” because of “the sudden and serious deterioration in the U.S. housing market.”
UBS’s sneeze meant that Thornburg, among others, caught a major cold. By writing down the value of its Alt--A mortgages, UBS forced other players in the market to begin to revalue the Alt--A mortgages on their books. Since these were the very assets that Thornburg (and Bear Stearns) used as collateral for its short--term borrowings, soon after February 14 the company’s creditors made margin calls “in excess of $300 million” on its short--term borrowings. At first, Thornburg used what cash it had to meet the margin calls. But that did not stop the worries of its creditors. “After meeting all of its margin calls as of February 27, 2008, Thornburg Mortgage saw further continued deterioration in the market prices of its high quality, primarily AAA--rated mortgage securities,” the company wrote in a March 3 filing with the SEC. This new deterioration of the value of its prime mortgages resulted in new margin calls of $270 million–among them $49 million from Morgan Stanley, $28 million from JPMorgan on February 28, and $54 million from Goldman Sachs.
This time, though, Thornburg was “left with limited available liquidity” to meet the new margin calls or any future margin calls. From December 31, 2007, to March 3, 2008, Thornburg received margin calls totaling $1.777 billion and was able to satisfy only $1.167 billion of them, or about 65 percent–a dismal performance. The balance of $610 million “significantly exceeded its available liquidity,” the company announced on March 7. “These events have raised substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern without significant restructuring and the addition of new capital.” The company’s stock, which had traded for more than $28 per share in May 2007, closed at $4.32 on March 3, 2008, down 51 percent ...
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