The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns |  | Author: Alan C. Greenberg
Creator: Mark Singer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 41,997
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 1416562885
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.660973
EAN: 9781416562887
ASIN: 1416562885
Publication Date: June 1, 2010
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Product Description
On March 16, 2008, Alan Greenberg, former CEO and current chairman of the executive committee of Bear Stearns, found himself in the company’s offices on a Sunday. More remarkable by far than the fact that he was in the office on a Sunday is what he was doing: participating in a meeting of the board of directors to discuss selling the company he had worked decades to build for a fraction of what it had been worth as little as ten days earlier. In less than a week the value of Bear Stearns had diminished by tens of billions of dollars. As Greenberg recalls, "our most unassailable assumption—that Bear Stearns, an independent investment firm with a proud eighty-five-year history, would be in business tomorrow—had been extinguished. . . . What was it, exactly, that had happened, and how, and why?" This book provides answers to those questions from one of Wall Street’s most respected figures, the man most closely identified with Bear Stearns’ decades of success.
The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns is Alan Greenberg’s remarkable story of ascending to the top of one of Wall Street’s venerable powerhouse financial institutions. After joining Bear Stearns in 1949, Greenberg rose to become formally head of the firm in 1978. No one knows the history of Bear Stearns as he does; no one participated in more key decisions, right into the company’s final days. Greenberg offers an honest, clear-eyed assessment of how the collapse of the company surprised him and other top executives, and he explains who he thinks was responsible. This is a candid, fascinating account of a storied career and its stunning conclusion. "Whoever coined the adage about hindsight being twenty-twenty didn’t make any allowance for astigmatism or myopia. Whose hindsight? And from what distance? A picture clarifies or blurs with the passage of time, and whatever image emanates at a given instant is colored by the biases of the observer. Knowing that my perceptions of the fall of Bear Stearns are inevitably somewhat subjective, I’ve tried to make sense of exactly what happened when and how this or that development along the way contributed to the ultimate outcome. I’ve wanted to get a fix on the moment when we ceased controlling our own destiny—not out of intramural curiosity but because that loss of control resonated and replicated globally. For those of us who across decades gave so much of ourselves to Bear Stearns, what took place during a single week in March 2008 was a watershed in our lives. With sufficient time and distance, as the context expanded, we could recognize it as the signal event of an enormous disruption that the world will be struggling to recover from for years to come." —from THE RISE AND FALL OF BEAR STEARNS
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 The vengeful demi-God July 23, 2010
ACEMAN (Paris, FR)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I've rated this semi-autobiography five stars not because it is a great work but rather it gives us insight, unintentional as it might be, to one of Wall Streets most vengeful characters. He takes credit for just about all of Bear Stearns' money making capacities but tells us he had sold nearly all his stock in the company as a matter of course over the years that he was in charge and as its chairman. He's incredibly vengeful to the very people he hand picked to run the company and seems hung up on office politics to the maximum. He tells us over and over again that he does not know the new products and in fact didn't have a clue as to what BS was selling or buying. Some Chairman and manager!What he does well is to reveal himself as an inane dummy whose brashness, not intelligence, got the company to the pinnacle of Wall Street only to have sold out before the crash going back many, many years. At 82 years of age he sounds so juvenile and immature. Also, it is faily obvious when he adds his two cents worth and where the narrative was written by the co-author. We all should try to get a handle on whose running these companies so as not to be fooled again. And by the way, if you didn't know it by now, Bear Stearns crashed and burned and left the dregs to investors, employees and retirees. Thanks Allan, we owe you something for your insights, i.e., a huge Bronx cheer.
5/5 very informative ... would definitely recommend! July 20, 2010
Henry David Thoreau
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I got this book from my school library and was curious to get a first hand account of what really happened at Bear Stearns. Mr. Greenberg weaves an interesting story about his rise to head of the company and who later after semi-retirement, becomes the conscience of the company that was completely ignored by its incompetent CEO Mr. Cayne (who seemed to think that that playing bridge was more important than running the company). I must say that I learned a great deal about what actually transpired during the crisis (the drying up of the repo market), etc.
Mr. Greenberg does not come off as being unapologetic or anything of the sort that the reviewers on this site recommended. Some of the comments are pretty much outright lies, since his role before the crisis began was purely advisory. As a student of finance, I would say that the fundamental takeaway from the book is that, never make too many assumptions, and never sell or buy anything that you truly do not understand.
Readable book by a good person July 24, 2010
Iris Rich (Ann Arbor, MI United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Ace Greenberg retains a voice that rings with honesty and common sense. He is a good writer on business, because he doesn't lose the reader in details intended to prove he can describe a complicated business transaction. He keeps the characters to a relatively manageable minimum, enabling the reader to follow the narrative. Other books on the financial crisis get bogged down periodically in details. Greenberg is quite rare. Most business leaders cannot write anything of interest about their career or business knowledge. Most writers about business labor unsuccessfuly to transmit a clear understanding of transactions or to make the story readable. Greenberg is able to write (yes, he had help, but it's his voice) and he can keep the reader's interest. The book is a fast read. It also sets the record straight in matters involving the stories about Bear's fate retailed by Jimmy Cayne. Greenberg seems generally to live and let live, but, for Cayne, he makes an exception. He says to sell a losing stock and forget it. In this book, Ace sells Cayne.
Great Reading July 6, 2010
Laura504 (New York, NY)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book was easy to understand and quick reading. It gives a factual account of what happened to Bear Stearns with no embellishment.
 The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns - Alan Greenberg (Simon & Schuster) July 19, 2010
BlogOnBooks (Los Angeles CA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For another angle on the U.S. financial meltdown we look to Alan `Ace' Greenberg's latest book (his second) "The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns." Ace's book is more of a memoir than a chronicle of the latest round of financial regress on the Street. The legendary Wall Street personality regales the reader with stories of his Oklahoma upbringings, his early days at Bear Stearns (where he served out his half-century career) all the way up to the days of running the company, avoiding the dot-com bust but landing head-first in the quicksand that became the mortgage backed securities, sub-prime meltdown.
Sitting and watching Bear's stock price plummet from the high hundreds to an eventual $2 a share offer from JP Morgan Chase was both a sobering and melancholy finale for the well-respected veteran Greenberg. Though rather than crying sour grapes over this terminal ending, Greenberg saves most of his vitriol for his CEO replacement, Jimmy Cayne, who Greenberg views with unconstrained disgust as he (Cayne) appears to disregard the well-being of the company in its darkest moments, preferring to play golf or compete in bridge tournaments where he was a renowned championship player; a proverbial Nero as CEO.
The shame of the book is two-fold. One, is that Greenberg, a legend on Wall Street, shares very little of what made him the expert arbitrager of financial markets in the 70's, 80's and 90's, and more importantly, that the book, only 197 pages in length, seems more designed to settle the score of his late period conflicts with those who took his position(s). If his purpose, as it appears, was to create what one writer described as a `memoir as revenge," Greenberg has succeeded. If that is your view of success.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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