The Book

“You just can’t make this shit up.

...there has never been a more appropriate description for a situation like the one I lived through beginning on Monday, March 10, 2008. So appropriate did I find the phrase, in fact, that it was the last thing I said to the woman whose place on the Bear Stearns trading floor was directly across the table from mine on that fateful day. The day that, in my mind, became known as the ‘beginning of the end...’ ” –from the first chapter

Bear, Stearns & Co., a storied Wall Street firm with a maverick reputation had endured many crises throughout its 85-year history. Nothing however could have prepared the firm’s top leadership and pool of talented traders for the sudden death spiral that would leave the firm being taken over for a pittance. In one dramatic showdown with JP Morgan and the Fed this is the story of how fortunes were made and lost.

Anonymous, a senior executive at Bear Stearns, describes what happened within Bear’s walls and on the trading floor that resulted in the most sensational financial crisis of our times. He recounts in detail the chain of events that led to the downward spiral–from both Bear's point-of-view and from the overall world financial marketplace’s. He describes the securities manipulations that served to precipitate the credit crisis–those same securities we see in our IRAs and 401Ks. Anonymous reveals for the first time how foreign demand of US capital, too, played a role in the Bear's massacre, and he provides an insider's view of the unprecedented actions taken by the Treasury and Federal Reserve to avoid a world-wide financial crisis.

A Wall Street Legend, Bear Stearns had not had an unprofitable quarter since the crash of 1929 until the credit crisis of 2007-2008 when in a matter of days it was gone.