Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street

Kate, welcome onto the literary stage, you have the enviable talent of being able to turn a complex drama centered around the 'dry' old subject of finance, with many characters and being played out over just 72 hours, into a gripping, interesting and easily understandable account. You wisely resisted the pitfall of trying to educate the reader in the intricacies of modern 'casino' banking, which most other writers of The Credit Crunch debacle have fallen into. When most of the people at the very top of the banks and other financial institutions didn't understand the unbridled speculation going on under their very eyes and custodianship, it seems a bit pointless trying to 'speed' educate readers like myself, a long retired 68 year old into becoming a 'whiz-bang' degree totting 'Quant'. 'Street Fighters' is clear as to it's objective, namely to guide the reader carefully through the frantic attempts to save an old established 'maverick' investment bank from '3 days away' bankruptcy, in the most lucid way possible. That she succeeds is testament indeed to her talent as a writer. As one progresses through the chapters, it becomes blindingly obvious that Bear Sterns financial woes are largely self-inflicted and will provide University Business Faculties with endless cannon-fodder for the "How not to" syllabus. I have read most books on the recent financial troubles and this is one of the best.

As the description suggests this book details the last 72 hours of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest American Investment banks. existence before its purchase by JP Morgan. I would have enjoyed it a lot more had I not read William Cohan's superb House of Cards House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Collapse of the Global Market which in my mind is a lot better In my mind Street Fighters feels like quite a short book excluding the index and the sources section at the back, its about 220 pages long. I don't think this is long enough to give such a fascinating event enough coverage. The book seems to be well researched and there is plenty of input from the main characters, those running the bank, those thinking about buying the bank and the people from the US Fed and other government agencies. The author clearly understands her subject and all of the book is very understandable. There is no financial gobbledygook or alphabet soup of financial acronyms that crop up in other credit crunch books. One of the things which I found quite annoying is that in the middle of the sometimes, hour by hour account, there are plenty of bits of historic narrative about the history of the firm and some of the individuals and for me this broke up the excitement of reading what happened in the last few hours. Whilst the book stops after Bear Stearns is bought by JP Morgan on the sunday night, there is a short epilogue which explains some of the things which happened afterwards. In my view, one of the most interesting things about this event is that the purchase price went up from $2 per share to $10 per share in the weeks after and whilst the book mentions this it makes no attempt to explain the background. William Cohan's book has a detailed account of the reasons and the background for this crucial change. If you have read House of Cards, I probably wouldn't bother with this book as it doesn't tell you anything you don't know already. If you haven't read House of Cards and are looking for a shortish account of the final days of Bear Stearns this is a good book. If you want a detailed, well written and researched account, I would strongly recommend you read House of Cards.

I decided to read this job before starting a job in finance. It achieves its aim in identifying key events in the Bear Sterns timeline and major players as well as the impacts of the fed's policy on Bear. However, the structure of the book proves it's major flaw. Often, you'll be engrossed by the power dynamics at play between bear and JPM and then it'll spend the next ten pages talking about the childhood of a lawyer who'll appear on five more pages for the rest of the book say. it felt like it was trying to reach a page count set by the publisher rather than all these backstories being necessary or interesting. It's also the case that most of this book is based on the authors own personal research, which should be commended, but the fault is that some of the people who do very little have a large chunk of the book dedicated to them and their perspective while others go unnoted. I do recommend you give this book a read if you want to know about the culture of Bear and why it collapsed, but it's not for general interest reading.

Even though the outcome is reasonably well known, this book is still very exciting and its almost real time format only adds to this. Compulsive reading.

Excellent account of the last days at Bear Sterns, and a bit easier to read than William D. Cohan's "House Of Cards". The book is adapted from Kelly 's original WSJ pieces so those are worth checking out if you want to get a feel of it.

What an amazing story. Bear Sterns, one of the most powerful financial companies in the country, trades at $57 on Thursday, March 13, 2008, and within 72 hours it is sold for $2, on Sunday, March 16, 2008. I found this book to be just incredible. The author writes in a narrative format about the 72 hours detailing all the events that lead to the collapse of Bear Sterns. It almost seems like you are in a movie theatre watching a documentary. The book presents how the hubris, greed, and culture of the firm's employees made them care about one thing - the money. In the end, they ended up paying a steep price for their actions. If you want to read an amazing story, this is a good book. - Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

This book is a tremendous, swift--almost frenzied--account of the last four days in the life of Bear Stearns. It is a fast, lucid and exhilarating read that fills in the gaps glossed over by Sorkin in his excellent book TOO BIG TO FAIL. As mesmerizing as TOO BIG TO FAIL is, it pays only passing attention to the failure of Bear. This book by Kate Kelly, unlike a number of other business books lately, is carefully and well written. Not a word is wasted. With sparse, direct and blunt prose, we get a contoured sense of many of the key players not only at Bear but also we get a sense of Paulson, Geither and Bernanke. The writing is stark and unadorned, but it serves its purpose, and the ultimate effect is that she has authored a book that literally is hard to put down. An important contribution to the rapidly growing library that will allow us to get a better understanding of our current financial crisis.

Ms. Kelly's book saw me most amusingly through an undisturbed day of jury duty (no, I was not impanelled). The chronicle of Bear Stearns' downfall is melodrama of the highest order and the author details almost to the hour the events of that fateful weekend in the spring of 2008. The cast of characters is colorful, and in the end, however bruised, they all seemed to have remained millionaires (alas, not the underlings). This text is absorbing in detailing the mechanics of how the company crumbled, particularly its final hours. I would have liked, even if as an appendix, deeper and more thorough business analysis of the road to failure, for example, how the two hedge fund bankruptcies in 2007 came about, how the toxic assets were packaged and sold. To make an analogy: we get the riveting story of the Titanic converging with an iceberg on a cold spring night in the north Atlantic and portraits of the colorful characters on board. I would like to know more about how the ship got there, why the ship sank. With this story about Bear Stearns one is left wanting to know more about the business issues and practices involved, not only at Bear Stearns, but elsewhere, e.g. Lehmann. In all fairness, Ms. Kelly has done a fabulous work of reportage in "Street Fighters" and one cannot fault her for not writing a different book from the one she had in mind. What she wrote is splendid. Given all that happened subsequently in the world at large, one cannot help but be "curioser." That book, a sort of Lords of Finance Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World of the current crisis still needs to be written though now it is a bit premature. Then the true relevance of the Bear Stearns debacle and the way it was dealt with by all, including the government, can be adequately assessed. Such work is still a way off, I'm afraid.

Street Fighters is not about the reasons why Bear Stearns failed and how did its management came to this mess. Kate Kelly did not write a book for those readers who want cold analysis of the problem. By getting right to the company's collapse and using her style of slight exaggeration (as one of reviewers on Amazon pointed out, excitement in this book is provided by constant overstatement) author wants us to feel the pressure of those last hours and, in my opinion, she succeeds in doing that. Although I enjoyed reading this book, I would recommend it only for those looking for a fast and intense read.

Great read, if you want an easy read that details the final days of bear sterns in an entertaining and informative way this is it. I will definitely look gr more books from this author.

Expectedly just as in every book review, people have very different opinions regarding Kate Kelly's work. In my opinion if you're looking for a very general synopsis of what happened to the giant investment bank as a whole, this book will disappoint you. However if you're already aware of the hedge fund collapse during summer of 2007, Bear's "liquidity problem" gossips circulating around Wall Street for weeks even months, and want to get a more detailed rundown on what really happened in those past 3 days, then look no further because you found the correct reading material. I also enjoyed the writers style where talking about senior members of the bank (Molinaro, Cayne, "Ace" Greenberg, etc) she pauses the story for a little while and gives some background information about their career and life stories which is quite informative. The book is also written in a way where you feel like you are living the catastrophe with the upper management by describing little details here and there that gives the work a true excitement. I certainly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to readers who are interested in learning how this investment banking giant came to its knees in just a matter of 3 days.