William D. Cohan

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres and Co:

William D. Cohan, 2008

Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the «Great Men» who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built. William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein. Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington. Felix’s dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly. The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm. Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion. Bruce’s take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable. «The Last Tycoons» is a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth—a story of high drama in the world of high finance. Подробнее

House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism

William D. Cohan, 2009

On the evening of March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling eighty-five-year-old institution in the financial world, sold itself for an outrageously low price to the $2 trillion global behemoth JP Morgan Chase. Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun. What went wrong? In House of Cards bestselling author and former investment banker William Cohan gives the reader a front-row seat at Wall Street’s catastrophic unravelling at the seams, and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Through the prism of Bear Stearns, he shows how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making have wrought havoc on the world financial system. Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, as the US government and federal bank began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt. But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities. Full of insider knowledge and larger-than-life characters, such as Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman and his profane, colorful rival Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won in the end, House of Cards is a shocking tale of greed, arrogance and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us. Подробнее

House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism

William D. Cohan, 2010

It was Wall Street's toughest investment bank, taking risks where others feared to tread, run by testosterone-fuelled gamblers who hung a sign saying 'let's make nothing but money' over the trading floor. Yet in March 2008 the 85-year-old firm Bear Stearns was brought to its knees — and global economic meltdown began. With unprecedented access to the people at the eye of the financial storm, William Cohan tells the outrageous story of how Wall Street's entire house of cards came crashing down. 'Gripping...high drama...riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading' — Michio Kakutani, The New York Times. Подробнее

William D. Cohan

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