Short Synopsis
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.

Full Synopsis
In March 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling eighty-four-year-old financial institution, was forced to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for an outrageously low price in a deal brokered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was desperately trying to prevent the impending catastrophic market crash. But mere months before, an industry-wide boom had "the Bear" clocking a record high stock price. How did a giant investment bank with $18 billion in cash on hand disappear in a mere ten days? In this tour de force, Cohan provides a minute-by-minute account of the events that brought America's second Gilded Age to an end.

Filled with intimate portraits of the major players, high-end gossip, and smart financial analysis, House of Cards recounts in delicious narrative form the dramatic events behind the fall of Bear Stearns and what it revealed about the financial world's progression from irrational boom to cataclysmic bust. House of Cards is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the dramatic and the unprecedented events that have reshaped Wall Street and global finance in the past two years.

"[A] fascinating tale." ---The Wall Street Journal

"Shocking" ---The Boston Globe

"Deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation." ---Los Angeles Times

"An authoritative, blow-by-blow account of the collapse of Bear Stearns." ---The Washington Post

"A kind of microcosm of what went wrong on Wall Street... and a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end." ---The New York Times

Time Best Business Book of 2009

New York Times Bestseller

Audie Finalist

Audible Bestseller