"House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street"

Enjoy cocktails and hors d'oeuvres with William Cohan, author and financial commentator for The New York Times, Fortune, etc. Hear this ex-investment banker's riveting tale of the fall of Bear Stearns, "Start Button" for our Great Recession in 2008.

"House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street"
"Fireside Chat" with Author William Cohan about the fall of Bear Stearns and Wall Street
ALL HARVARD ALUMNI MEMBERS, NON-MEMBERS, FAMILY, FRIENDS AND GUESTS WELCOME !
Thursday, March 31, 2011 
5:30-6:30 pm Networking, Hot & Cold Hors d' oeuvres, soft drinks. Cash Bar Cocktails, Beer & Wine
6:30  Conversation with Bill Cohan
7:15-8:00 pm  Q & A and Book Signing
Location: Marina Jack's Bay Front Room (2nd Floor)
Cost: $18 For Club Members & Their Guests; $20 for Non-Members & Their Guests
CALL RESERVATIONS HOTLINE 941-379-3463
AND Send Check (Payable to Sarasota Harvard Club) for # ______ Reservations to : 
Rosalie & Charlie Peirce, 5264 Myrtle Wood, Sarasota, FL 34235
About Our Speaker
William D. Cohan offers audiences a unique, close-up perspective of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. He combines deep knowledge of the investment banking world with fine storytelling skills. A former award-winning investigative reporter in Raleigh, N.C., he now writes in the New York Times about Wall Street and Main Street. In addition, Bill is a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV and writes regularly for Vanity Fair, Fortune, the Financial Times, ArtNews and The Daily Beast.
 
 He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 17 years as a Vice President at Lazard Frères, a director in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Merrill Lynch and a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. 
 
Cohan is the author of "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" and "The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.,"  His forthcoming book is titled "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule The World", a revelatory history of Goldman Sachs. It will be available April 12, 2011.
About His Work
On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation's fifth-largest investment bank: "In my book, they are insolvent."  This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.
How this happened - and why - is the subject of William D. Cohan's superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making 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, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke 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.  --From Amazon.com