Book Portrays Demise of Wall Street Thugs

The latest telling of our current financial woe is Kate Kelly’s Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street. The author and Wall Street Journal reporter told Media Bistro about tearing through the work of writing the book and then getting back to full-time work at the paper the day after she turned in the manuscript.

“We wanted to get the book out quickly because we knew events were happening very fast in the marketplace,” she explained. “People seemed interested in what was going on in Wall Street and the markets, so for sure we wanted to get out quickly before there was a tsunami of books about broader issues and the crisis. We believed that Bear Stearns was the first domino to fall.”

When one of the oldest, most resilient firms on Wall Street is sold at a fire sale price, something has gone wildly wrong. Kate Kelly chronicles the final, frenzied 72 hours of Bear Stearns operations as an independent firm.

Kelly captures the culture that Bear Stearns had cultivated over several decades, one of “P.S.Ds” — employees who were poor, smart, and deeply desired becoming rich. Elite families and Ivy League degrees didn’t matter at Stearns as much as raw aggression and the willingness to do almost anything to make money for the firm. Hence the title – Street Fighters.

This brand of leaders were arrogant and successful, guiding the firm through every crisis from the Great Depression to the dotcom bubble. But the subprime mortgage crisis pitted key executives against each other.

The book grew out of Kate Kelly’s internatinally popular three-part series of articles on Bear Stearns, which ran on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal in May 2008.