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Penguin Press
April 2010
On Sale: April 6, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 1594202397
EAN: 9781594202391
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The roots of the mortgage bubble and the story of the
Wall Street collapse-and the government's unprecedented
response-from our most trusted business journalist.
The End of Wall Street is a blow-by-blow
account of America's biggest financial collapse since the
Great Depression. Drawing on 180 interviews, including
sit-downs with top government officials and Wall Street
CEOs, Lowenstein tells, with grace, wit, and razor-sharp
understanding, the full story of the end of Wall
Street as we knew it. Displaying the qualities that made
When Genius Failed a timeless classic of Wall
Street-his sixth sense for narrative drama and his unmatched
ability to tell complicated financial stories in ways that
resonate with the ordinary reader-Roger Lowenstein weaves a
financial, economic, and sociological thriller that indicts
America for succumbing to the siren song of easy debt and
speculative mortgages.
The End of Wall
Street is rife with historical lessons and bursting with
fast-paced action. Lowenstein introduces his story with
precisely etched, laserlike profiles of Angelo Mozilo, the
Johnny Appleseed of subprime mortgages who spreads toxic
loans across the landscape like wild crabapples, and moves
to a damning explication of how rating agencies helped gift
wrap faulty loans in the guise of triple-A paper and a
takedown of the academic formulas that-once again- proved
the ruin of investors and banks. Lowenstein excels with a
series of searing profiles of banking CEOs, such as the
ferretlike Dick Fuld of Lehman and the bloodless Jamie Dimon
of JP Morgan, and of government officials from the restless,
deal-obsessed Hank Paulson and the overmatched Tim Geithner
to the cerebral academic Ben Bernanke, who sought to avoid a
repeat of the one crisis he spent a lifetime trying to
understand-the Great Depression.
Finally, we come
to understand the majesty of Lowenstein's theme of liquidity
and capital, which explains the origins of the crisis and
that positions the collapse of 2008 as the greatest ever of
Wall Street's unlearned lessons. The End of Wall
Street will be essential reading as we work to identify
the lessons of the market failure and start to rebuild.
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