A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers
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One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers--right from the belly of the beast.In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald's Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts "gateway to nowhere" housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world's toughest trading floors. We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor... The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani Mr. McDonald's book gives the reader a visceral sense of what it was like to work at Lehman Brothers and the fateful decisions and events that led to the company's death spiral—decisions that turned the once-proud firm into a grim illustration, in the words of one of the author's colleagues, of the "colossal failure of common sense."
Prologue 11 A Rocky Road to Wall Street 92 Scaring Morgan Stanley to Death 343 Only the Bears Smiled 574 The Man in the Ivory Tower 815 A Miracle on the Waterway 1066 The Day Delta Air Lines Went Bust 1317 The Tragedy of General Motors 1568 The Mortgage Bonanza Blows Out 1829 King Richard Thunders Forward 21010 A $100 Million Crash for Subprime's Biggest Beast 24111 Wall Street Stunned as Kirk Quits 26612 Fuld, Defiant to the End 296Epilogue 327Acknowledgments 341Index 343
