On Monday, March 10, 2008, the early tremors of America’s subprime mortgage meltdown began rippling down on Wall Street at lightning speed. Seven short days later, Bear Stearns, the 85 -year-old investment bank known for its financial pugilism and outsized profits, found itself on the brink of unthinkable collapse; making the firm ground zero for a crisis that would go on to engulf the entire global financial system. Confidence Game reveals that the downfall of Bear Stearns was not merely a weeklong event, but was an inevitable occurrence that had been 10 years in the making.
Interviews with former employees, homeowners, mortgage brokers, whistleblowers and eminent financial journalists including Bryan Burrough, William D. Cohan and Andrew Ross Sorkin provide context for a destruction of wealth not seen since the Great Depression.
Confidence Game reveals how an amalgam of Washington policy and regulatory failures, compliant ratings agencies, media manipulation and fraud in the subprime mortgage market on a massive scale short-circuited Wall Street nearly destroying the American Economy.
