House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism
William D. Cohan
Allen Lane £25, 468 pages
ISBN 9781846141959

The current financial crisis has been identified – by David Goodhart of Prospect – as only the second ‘world historical event’ since 1945, the first being the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. And just as it would have required a decade or more of perspective for any scholar to write the definitive history of the collapse of East European communism, so it is far too early to offer definitive judgement on the near-collapse of global capitalism. But that creates a problem for financial writers, because the book market is hungering for elegant explanations of why it has happened.

The solution is to go one of two ways: attempt an interim analysis of the whole damned thing, or produce an in-depth narrative of one major incident, a single strand of the story, which will stand as an authoritative source for those who tackle the big picture later. There are plenty of the first category already coming down the track, and the title of House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism suggests it might be one of them. But actually it belongs to the second category: it is William D. Cohan’s fly-on-the-wall record of the downfall of Bear Stearns, the swashbuckling and fifth-ranking Wall Street investment bank, in March 2008.

As we know from The Last Tycoons – his award-winning inside story of Lazard Frères, where he was once an M&A banker himself – Cohan is a master of this genre. His appetite for minute-by-minute detail is formidable and – by transcribing foul-mouthed interviews verbatim, often in the dramatic present tense – he perfectly captures the raw voice of Wall Street. His big characters, the gamblers of the title who were the top executives of Bear Stearns, talk like Damon Runyon updated by Martin Scorsese. Here are the two biggest, ‘Ace’ Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, successive chief executives of the firm and in later days bitter enemies, discussing their shared obsession with bridge when Greenberg interviewed Cayne for a job in 1969:

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP