House of Cards


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Hardcover
468 pages
ISBN 9780385528269 Published March 2009
Doubleday Books
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House of Cards
A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
By William D Cohan 

Related Blog Posts
The Greatest Gamble Ever
Posted April 20, 2010 12:27 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Gregory Zuckerheim's The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-The-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History tells of how Paulson "realized something few others suspected—that the housing market and the value of sub-prime mortgages we grossly inflated and headed for a major fall." But it turns out that "The Greatest Trade Ever" may have been something very akin to a rigged bet. What the book didn't tell us (because it was unknown at the time) is that Paulson had shaped the portfolio of mortgages—hand-picking the bonds it contained for Goldman Sachs—that he bet against to make his fortune. (This is what is behind the SEC suit being brought against Goldman Sachs we've been hearing so much about.)

Instead of explaining this myself (Because I don't know if I really can), I'll defer to The New York Times and the authors they've had weigh in on the situation this week.

Yesterday, Too Big To Fail author Andrew Ross Sorking wrote about When Wall Street Deals Resemble Casino Wagers:

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in its suit, says that Mr. Paulson asked Goldman to help create a synthetic C.D.O. of lousy mortgage loans that he selected so he could bet that they would go down and then profit on their fall

[...]

This kind of high finance can numb the brain, and the legal questions are murky. But when you strip all of that away, this deal was nothing more than a roll of the dice.

Try this mental exercise: Imagine if, a few years ago, an influential investor like Warren Buffett, bullish on real estate, had asked Goldman to develop a synthetic C.D.O. made up of undervalued mortgages.

Now, imagine if Goldman had found John Paulson to take the opposite side of the trade and, lo and behold, a year later Mr. Buffett turned out to be right and Mr. Paulson lost his shirt. Would you call that fraud? Would you be very upset?

Maybe not, but Mr. Paulson sure would be. And he might be inclined to sue over it, especially if he found out that his bet had been rigged against him from the start.

Today, Roger Lowenstein, author of The End of Wall Street, took his turn explaining Goldman's Gambling With the Economy:

Wall Street’s purpose, you will recall, is to raise money for industry: to finance steel mills and technology companies and, yes, even mortgages. But the collateralized debt obligations involved in the Goldman trades, like billions of dollars of similar trades sponsored by most every Wall Street firm, raised nothing for nobody. In essence, they were simply a side bet—like those in a casino—that allowed speculators to increase society’s mortgage wager without financing a single house.

[...]

The government would not look fondly on Caesar’s Palace if it opened a table for wagering on corporate failure. It should not give greater encouragement for Goldman Sachs to do so.

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 author and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, in his Op-Ed piece about Looters in Loafers on Sunday, explained how these bets made the overall recession worse:

So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.

As for the alleged creation of investments designed to fail, these may have magnified losses at the banks that were on the losing side of these deals, deepening the banking crisis that turned the burst housing bubble into an economy-wide catastrophe.

And, though not specifically about Goldman Sachs and the SEC suit being brought against it, William Cohan, the author of House of Cards, took the space allotted him today on the Op-Ed page today to say You're Welcome, Wall Street.



Books as Intellectual Assets in an Economic Discourse
Posted March 18, 2010 3:30 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Michael Lewis's latest book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, was released this week to a lot of media attention and bestseller lists. We'll review the book more in depth on this site and elsewhere over the coming weeks, but its very release is what's giving me hope this week.

You see, for all the doom-and-gloom surrounding publishing these days, publishers themselves have done a quietly masterful job of finding books that put the Great Recession, and what caused it, in focus over the last year and a half—Michael Lewis being but the latest (albeit one of the finest) voices in the choir that publishers have been directing. And I think it is a very important task they're accomplishing. In a media environment dominated by the 24 hour news-cycle, and inundated with soundbites and tweets that flutter into the crowded cultural ether, soon to be forgotten, it is important that someone documents what went wrong in depth—where, why, when and how—and, dare I say, on paper.

And we need these books and the discussions they raise not only in academic circles, not only in and our intellectual and political culture; we need it in our popular culture. An academic dissection of what exactly went wrong, by the numbers, is important. But we need more than an economist's dissertation on the situation (though many economist's have written excellent and accessible books on the crisis). Newspapers and magazines can document the events as they're happening, and often provide a invaluable insight or angle that sheds light on what's going on. But the story is ever-changing, always evolving, and their job is to follow it, to report on its latest developments—sometimes at the expense of the larger picture (though some of the best books on the recession have been from journalists that stepped back from it all to distill that picture). Cable news and the echo chamber of the political blogosphere have their place, but we need more than talking points and counterpoints.

And this is what publishers have been so good at: finding authors and books that can inform and influence all of those discussions (and, at the same time, transcend them) and then getting them out there to do so. The are capturing the larger narratives by finding authors that can write them. They have told many stories, by many authors, from many different angles, exposing the different elements and individuals involved in the crisis. The books they've put out are, generally, well-researched and written well enough to hold serious intellectual weight, but not so obscure that the general public can't understand what's going on. The stories in these books are complicated, and often insane, but these authors are making them accessible, and publishers are making them available.

It may sound like hyperbole, but I think these books can help better not only the business and financial worlds, but the world itself. They tell a story we'll need to hear before we can correct the course our economy has been on. I sincerely hope those with their hands on the levers of power are listening to (and reading) them as they're discussing how to do so.

Here is a quick list of some of the books that I'd suggest (if you have some, please add them in the comments section):

That's just a start, and I know I'm missing a lot... probably some big ones. And that's not even getting into those books that focus more on how we recover, reset and reform our financial system (and individual companies) now that all the damage has occurred—books like Anna Bernasek's The Economics of Integrity that discuss solutions on a macro level and the Boston Consulting Group's Accelerating Out of the Great Recession that do so on a micro level.

Andrew Ross Sorkin concluded his book, Too Big to Fail, with a great story:

When the post-bailout debate was still at its highest pitch, Jamie Dimon sent Hank Paulson a note with a quote from a speech that Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910 entitled "Citizenship of the Republic." It reads:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

It was a remarkable quote for Dimon to have chosen. While Roosevelt's words described a hero, they were deeply ambiguous about whether that hero succeeded or failed. And so it is with Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and the dozens of public- and private-sector figures who populate this drama. It will be left to history to judge how they fared during their own time "in the arena."

In my opinion, publishers are doing a wonderful job of documenting "the arena" for us all (and hopefully those inside the arena) to consider... and for history to judge.



Amazon's Best of 2009
Posted Dec. 4, 2009 6:11 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog

Amazon does an interesting thing every year, putting their best selling books in each genre on the same page as their editors' pick so you can easily compare the two.

I am sure that, were I an author, I'd hope to see my name on the bestsellers list. It would mean that I had not only done well financially for the year but, more importantly, that my book had made it into the hands of more readers—my ideas into the minds of more people.

That said, as a reader I always look at the editors' list first. I don't know who Amazon's editors actually are—come to think of it, the only person I know works for Amazon is Jeff Bezos—but I'm guessing that, like us, they spend their days at work poring over the many books that come across their desks, and they've probably become pretty damn good at picking which ones they're going to take home and focus on. There are a lot of books every year that will never see the light of a bestsellers list—that will never catch the popular eye—that nonetheless contain provoking insights for thought leaders and have a greater long-term effect on our lives than a flash-in-the-pan bestseller.

Ideally, of course, you'd make both lists. Congratulations to Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the authors of Animal Spirits, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, on that feat.

Here are the complete lists in Amazon's Business & Investing category for 2009:

The customer favorites:

  1. House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan, Doubleday

  2. The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times by Martin D. Weiss, John Wiley & Sons

  3. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods, Regnery Press

  4. Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan: Keeping Your Money Safe & Sound by Suze Orman, Spiegel & Grau

  5. The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent, Free Press

  6. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press

  7. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press

  8. How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins, HarperCollins

  9. Strengths-Based: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press

  10. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, Workman Publishing Company

The editors' list:

  1. The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox, HarperBusiness

  2. Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press

  3. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press

  4. How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Connors & Tom Smith, Portfolio

  5. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher, Penguin Press

  6. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business

  7. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith, John Wiley & Sons

  8. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press

  9. SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Crown Business

  10. Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod, Portfolio

Other notable editors' picks are T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt published by Penguin Press, winner of the NBA in nonfiction and put in the Biographies & Memoirs category by Amazon's editors, and Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, published by Metropolitan Books, which was the number one editors' pick in the History category.

Other customer favorites include Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough, both published by Penguin Press, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M Reinhart and published by Princeton University Press. All of these were in the History category.

To delve into the lists more, head on over to Amazon's Best of 2009.



strategy + business Best Books of 2009
Posted Nov. 25, 2009 4:52 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog

The strategy + business annual books list is always one of the finest and most anticipated of the year. They get really smart and talented people who know how to pick 'em, and have them write (always highly intelligent and insightful) essays on their category—and, of course, the books in it. I've listed the picks below, but it really is worth heading over to strategy + business for the essays. (The links to the individual essays are in the headings below.)

Clive Crook picks the best books on The Meltdown:

Charles Handy picks the Leadership books:

Phil Rosenzweig picks the books on Strategy:

Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna take on Globalization:

Judith F. Samuelson picks the Management books:

Catharine P. Taylor finds the best books on Marketing:

Steven Levy looks at the best books on Technology:

James O'Toole picks the best Biographies:

As Theodore Kinni writes in the introduction to this year's essays:

This year’s best business books help us understand current conditions and chart a secure course forward. With luck, next year’s best books will offer similar insight into a recovery of historic proportions.

You can read the full feature here.

We've been following this list since 2003. The previous years' lists are below.

2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008



Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year - The Longlist
Posted Aug. 12, 2009 10:40 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog

The longlist for the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award has been announced. The press release states that "The award is designed to highlight the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance, and economics."

The books on the longlist are:

The shortlist will be announced in September, and the overall winner will be announced at gala dinner in London at the end of October. We will, of course, keep you informed of further developments.




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