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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionseBook editionsStreet Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Streetby Kate Kelly
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:The shocking fall of Bear Stearns in March 2008 set off a wave of global financial turmoil that continues to ripple. 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 guys who ran Bear so aggressively miscalculate so completely? In this vivid and dramatic narrative, Kate Kelly takes us inside Bear's walls during its final, frenzied 72 hours as an independent firm. Expanding with fresh detail from her acclaimed front- page series in The Wall Street Journal, she captures every sight, sound, and smell of those three unbelievable days. For decades, Bear had proudly recruited "P.S.Ds"- employees who were poor, smart, and had a deep desire to become rich. An elite family or Ivy League diploma didn't matter. Were you willing to do almost anything to make money for the firm? Were you tough enough to be a street fighter? Bear's leaders were arrogant and didn't play nice. But their style had made them a fortune, and had helped Bear survive every crisis from the Great Depression to the dotcom bubble. Yet as the subprime mortgage crisis began to brew, the firm's key executives descended into civil war. Kelly reveals fresh, never-before-told details about the moves that led to that brutal final weekend. With a style as riveting as it is enlightening, Street Fighters is the definitive account of a once-great firm's demise, and the human folly that led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Review:"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) About the AuthorKate Kelly is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a former reporter for Time magazine and the New York Observer. She attracted international attention for her three-part series of articles on Bear Stearns, which ran on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal in May 2008. This is her first book. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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