Street Fighters
The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street
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4.4 • 17 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed New York Times bestseller—an explosive, inside look at the demise of a Wall Street giant
The fall of Bear Stearns in March 2008 set off a wave of global financial turmoil that rippled around the world. How could one of the oldest, most resilient firms on Wall Street go so far astray that it had to be sold at a fire sale price? How could the street fighters who ran Bear so aggressively miscalculate so completely?
Expanding with fresh detail from her highly praised front-page series in The Wall Street Journal, reporter Kate Kelly captures every sight, sound, and smell of Bear’s three final days. She also shows how Bear’s top executives descended into civil war as the mortgage crisis began to brew. A breathtaking piece of US history, Street Fighters is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the 2008 financial crisis—and for understanding how the actions of one Wall Street firm have affected the world to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street Journal reporter Kelly expands on her 2008 three-part series, written just two and a half months after the collapse of financial giant Bear Stearns, with an hour-by-hour account of the crisis that goes behind the stock prices and into the meeting rooms of top executives as the crisis comes into horrifying focus. A kind of "dysfunctional family, driven by greed and a complex code of internal politics," Kelly expertly breaks down Bear's vulnerability as a leader in mortgage-backed securities, with "one of the heaviest debt loads of any firm on the Street." As word got out that the firm was in trouble, a wave of panic selling sent the stock plummeting to $60 on the second day of the crisis (after securing Federal Reserve funding) only to bottom out at two dollars a share in fire-house-sale offer from J.P. Morgan. Enlivened by graphic descriptions of executive disarray and cameo profiles of scrambling financiers as they come to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster they unleashed (COO Friedman, when asked by NY Fed Geithner how bad it was, answered "Very. End of the world bad."), this riveting account puts the ensuing worldwide financial crises in stark perspective.
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