This book can be divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the events leading up to the collapse of the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns. It explores the last days of the firm's existence in a minute-by-minute narrative of events and conversations. The narrative consists primarily of transcripted interviews with some of the key figures at Bear Stearns and other people familiar with the firm's collapse.
The second section of the book consists of stories about the 80 year history of Bear Stearns from its founding to the period shortly before its demise. There are also profiles of the people who built and ran the company.
The final section of the book is a review of the housing bubble and the residential mortgage business that fueled the bubble. The author places significant blame for the housing bubble on the government. The government put in place policies to enable low-income people to buy houses. The government also set artificially low interest rates.
Low interest rates caused fixed-income investors, who traditionally seek low-risk investments, to seek higher interest rates in non-traditional investments that appeared to be low-risk. Investors found these apparently low-risk investments at Wall Street firms who had engineered new complex real estate investments based on residential mortgages and sub-prime mortgages. These new real estate investments were supposedly low-risk because traditional mortgage investments had historically been low-risk. The result was money flowed into the real estate market and created a huge financial and real estate price bubble that collapsed in 2008 and brought down Bear Stearns and other investment firms.
This book is rather tedious and repetitious. But it is comprehensive and covers all angles of the collapse of Bear Stearns. So if a reader is looking for a definitive history of the collapse of this company and what caused it, they will find this book enjoyable. However, most readers, even ones interested in the real estate bubble and collapse, will find this book contains more information than they require.
Also, as mentioned earlier, most of the book consists of transcript-like text from interviews with Wall Street bankers. And most of these people seem rather unpleasant and obnoxious. Many of them also seem quite stupid. They all just wanted to make a lot of money and travel around the world and attend social events and parties. They didn't have any interest in doing anything productive by creating something of use to other people. They are very unappealing people, so spending time reading what they have to say is not very enjoyable.
So for most people, this book will be a waste of time to read.
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