In “Street Fighters,” Wall Street Journal reporter Kate Kelly undertakes an hour-by-hour reconstruction of three days in March 2008 when Bear Stearns first realized it was collapsing, fought to save itself and, ultimately, agreed to a humiliating sale to JPMorgan.
It overstates nothing to call Kelly’s book brilliantly reported, and her narrative is grippingly propulsive and peopled with fascinatingly drawn characters. Notable among them are Bear’s Hamlet-like chief executive, Alan Schwartz, who wept in line at the nearby Starbucks on the morning he had to announce the sale, and Jimmy Cayne, the erratic and wildly eccentric cigar- smoking chairman, whose real passions appear to have been bridge and golf.
Kelly demonstrates that the locus of Bear Stearns’ fundamental problems derived from the unique interplay of its distinctive internal culture with the deeply flawed and, often, unfortunately idiosyncratic men who ran the place in those last years. Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
