On the evening of March 16, 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling eighty-five-year-old institution in the financial world, sold itself for an outrageously low price to the $2 trillion global behemoth JP Morgan Chase. Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun. What went wrong?

In House of Cards bestselling author and former investment banker William Cohan gives the reader a front-row seat at Wall Street’s catastrophic unravelling at the seams, and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Through the prism of Bear Stearns, he shows how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making have 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, as the US government and federal bank 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.

Full of insider knowledge and larger-than-life characters, such as Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman and his profane, colorful rival Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won in the end, House of Cards is a shocking tale of greed, arrogance and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.

What distinguishes 'House of Cards' from other business books? What put you in a unique position to write it?
Well what I hope distinguishes this book from the others that will be written about the current financial crisis is the powerful and amusing narrative that puts the reader in a front-row seat of one of the most harrowing financial collapses of all time. The book has some truly unique Wall Street characters and for the first time explains to the reader not only what happened, from an insider's perspective, but why.
What put me in a unique position to write the book was my 17-year Wall Street career that gave me a thorough understanding of how Wall Street works and gave me access to all the top executives involved in the crisis at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the government.
 
What led you to the title 'House of Cards'? What appealed to you about the fall of Bear Stearns?
The title is of course a double entendre, meant to imply a structure built on a shaky foundation, which certainly much of Wall Street turned out to be but also was selected because many of the top executives at Bear Stearns, including CEO Jimmy Cayne, ex-CEO Ace Greenberg and co-president Warren Spector were world-class bridge players and bridge became the grease for their career advancement. Also at many crucial moments during the firm's denouement Cayne especially but also Spector were playing bridge at national tournaments and were basically unreachable for long stretches of time.
What appealed to me about Bear Stearns was the fact that it was the first domino to fall and the people there were so unique and were out of central casting. Jimmy Cayne is one of the great all-time Wall Street characters. Also what happened across Wall Street can be learned by understanding what happened at Bear Stearns.
 
How do you start writing a book like this? 
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The first thing I realized I had to do was find a way to get the principals involved and start interviewing them. Getting to speak to Jimmy Cayne was the key, and happened, incredibly, 30 minutes after the shareholder vote that approved the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan. That was the first of my many interviews with Cayne.
 
Who was the crucial person you interviewed when writing this book?
See above. There could have been no book about what happened to Bear Stearns without interviewing Cayne. Even though by March 2008, he had been retired as CEO for two months, he was the embodiment of everything the firm became by March 2008. This is one the most distinguishing aspects of this book -- that Jimmy Cayne agreed to talk to me and explain how he created the modern Bear Stearns and how it all came apart, right before his eyes.
 
Do you think that there was anything that could have been done to save Bear Stearns?
Yes, if Bear Stearns and the rest of Wall Street had stayed firms in the mould of Lazard freres, which offered and offers only M&A advice and asset management services. Unfortunately, nearly every other Wall Street firm took a different path and ended up on the junk heap of history.
 
What do you think British banks can learn from Bear Stearns mistakes?
Not just Bear Stearns, but all of Wall Street - don't finance long-term assets on your balance sheet with short-term liabilities. Pure and simple. Even better, offer only advice, which requires no capital.
 
What do you think the global financial market will look like in 5 years time?
Capital markets will be functioning normally, thanks to the recent privatization of large banks across the globe.