Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America [Deckle Edge] (ISBN=9780307717863) 网盘下载 pdf 免费 2025 在线 epub 电子版

The intimate, fly-on-the wall tale of the decline and fall of an

America icon

With one notable exception, the firms that make up what we know as

Wall Street have always been part of an inbred, insular culture

that most people only vaguely understand. The exception was Merrill

Lynch, a firm that revolutionized the stock market by bringing Wall

Street to Main Street, setting up offices in far-flung cities and

towns long ignored by the giants of finance. With its “thundering

herd” of financial advisers, perhaps no other business, whether in

financial services or elsewhere, so epitomized the American spirit.

Merrill Lynch was not only “bullish on America,” it was a big

reason why so many average Americans were able to grow wealthy by

investing in the stock market.

Merrill Lynch was an icon. Its sudden decline, collapse, and

sale to Bank of America was a shock. How did it happen? Why did it

happen? And what does this story of greed, hubris, and incompetence

tell us about the culture of Wall Street that continues to this day

even though it came close to destroying the American economy? A

culture in which the CEO of a firm losing $28 billion pushes hard

to be paid a $25 million bonus. A culture in which two Merrill

Lynch executives are guaranteed bonuses of $30 million and $40

million for four months’ work, even while the firm is struggling to

reduce its losses by firing thousands of employees.

Based on unparalleled sources at both Merrill Lynch and Bank of

America, Greg Farrell’s Crash of the Titans is a Shakespearean saga

of three flawed masters of the universe. E. Stanley O’Neal, whose

inspiring rise from the segregated South to the corner office of

Merrill Lynch—where he engineered a successful turnaround—was

undone by his belief that a smooth-talking salesman could handle

one of the most difficult jobs on Wall Street. Because he enjoyed

O’Neal’s support, this executive was allowed to build up an

astonishing $30 billion position in CDOs on the firm’s balance

sheet, at a time when all other Wall Street firms were desperately

trying to exit the business. After O’Neal comes John Thain, the

cerebral, MIT-educated technocrat whose rescue of the New York

Stock Exchange earned him the nickname “Super Thain.” He was hired

to save Merrill Lynch in late 2007, but his belief that the markets

would rebound led him to underestimate the depth of Merrill’s

problems. Finally, we meet Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, a street

fighter raised barely above the poverty line in rural Georgia,

whose “my way or the highway” management style suffers fools more

easily than potential rivals, and who made a $50 billion commitment

over a September weekend to buy a business he really didn’t

understand, thus jeopardizing his own institution.

The merger itself turns out to be a bizarre combination of

cultures that blend like oil and water, where slick Wall Street

bankers suddenly find themselves reporting to a cast of characters

straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies. BofA’s inbred culture,

which perceived New York banks its enemies, was based on loyalty

and a good-ol’-boy network in which competence played second fiddle

to blind obedience.

Crash of the Titans is a financial thriller that puts you in the

theater as the historic events of the financial crisis unfold and

people responsible for billion of dollars of other people’s money

gamble recklessly to enhance their power and their paychecks or to

save their own skins. Its wealth of never-before-revealed

information and focus on two icons of corporate America make it the

book that puts together all the pieces of the Wall Street

disaster.

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GREG FARRELL is a correspondent for the Financial Times.

In January 2009, he broke the news that Merrill Lynch had paid out

its 2008 bonuses a month ahead of schedule, in December, even

though Merrill was in the process of losing $28 billion for the

year, and Bank of America needed an extra $20 billion in taxpayer

funds to complete its acquisition of the firm. That story sparked

an investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo. Greg is

a past winner of the American Business Press’s Jesse Neal Award for

investigative reporting and a recipient of the Knight-Bagehot

Fellowship for business journalism. He earned a BA from Harvard

University and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at

Columbia University.

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Dan Tully, who served as Merrill's chief executive in the 1990s, told one newspaper, "Charlie Merrill would turn over in his grave if he knew we hired someone from Goldman Sachs."

Since the day Thain joined Merrill Lynch the previous December, Fleming, Heaton, Kronthal, and Tosi had encouraged him to sell the CDOs as soon as possible, no matter what the losses were. In recent months, even Nelson Chain joined the effort. But Thain paid no mind. It wasn't until April, when Thain was finalizing the agreements to bring Montag and Kraus on board, that the CEO's view changed. That was because Montag and Kraus insisted, as a final condition of their agreements to join Merrill Lynch, that Thain clean up the balance sheet and sell the CDOs before they showed up for work. Such was the power of Goldman Sachs.

On top of the news about Merrill's fourth-quarter losses, the $3 billion in bonus payments that had been reported in the paper that morning, and the controversy surrounding the additional $20 billion in taxpayer funds that had been loaned to BofA in order to help it close the Merrill Lynch deal, the story about Thain's $1.2 million office seemed like one outrage too many.

And then Gasparino reported that Lewis was on his way to New York at that moment to discuss Thain's future with the bank. By 11:00 a.m., the story of Thain's office and the bonuses had become the buzz in the Financial District, and the real-time report that Lewis was en route to New York, possibly to fire Thain, had turned the spectacle into the Wall Street version of O.J. Simpson in the Ford Bronco, with thousands of ban...

Success, as the saying goes, has a thousand fathers, while failure is a orphan.

媒体评论

"Eminently readable and convincing...There's great value to be

gained in the detail that Farrell reveals." —Salon

"An exhaustive reconstruction of how Merrill Lynch & Co. sealed

its own fate by

becoming more bullish on bonuses than on America." —James Pressley,

Bloomberg

"Farrell weaves his facts into a story...piling detail upon detail

to sketch the inner

workings of Merrill Lynch, which he calls the Wall Street firm that

made it possible for

average Americans to reap handsome returns in the stock market."

—USA Today

"The...financial crisis's answer to Game Change--John Heilemann and

Mark Halperin's

tattle-filled bestseller about the 2008 Presidential

election--Farrell shows that... seemingly trivial matters became

the obsessions of Wall Street executives as the subprime contagion

spread." —BusinessWeek

“Immaculately reported…Farrell has found one of the biggest untold

stories of the [financial crisis] drama.” —Financial Times

“Farrell tells a story based on hundreds of hours of interviews

that builds like a hurricane.” —Forbes.com

书籍介绍

The intimate, fly-on-the wall tale of the decline and fall of an America icon

With one notable exception, the firms that make up what we know as Wall Street have always been part of an inbred, insular culture that most people only vaguely understand. The exception was Merrill Lynch, a firm that revolutionized the stock market by bringing Wall Street to Main Street, setting up offices in far-flung cities and towns long ignored by the giants of finance. With its “thundering herd” of financial advisers, perhaps no other business, whether in financial services or elsewhere, so epitomized the American spirit. Merrill Lynch was not only “bullish on America,” it was a big reason why so many average Americans were able to grow wealthy by investing in the stock market.

Merrill Lynch was an icon. Its sudden decline, collapse, and sale to Bank of America was a shock. How did it happen? Why did it happen? And what does this story of greed, hubris, and incompetence tell us about the culture of Wall Street that continues to this day even though it came close to destroying the American economy? A culture in which the CEO of a firm losing $28 billion pushes hard to be paid a $25 million bonus. A culture in which two Merrill Lynch executives are guaranteed bonuses of $30 million and $40 million for four months’ work, even while the firm is struggling to reduce its losses by firing thousands of employees.

Based on unparalleled sources at both Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, Greg Farrell’s Crash of the Titans is a Shakespearean saga of three flawed masters of the universe. E. Stanley O’Neal, whose inspiring rise from the segregated South to the corner office of Merrill Lynch—where he engineered a successful turnaround—was undone by his belief that a smooth-talking salesman could handle one of the most difficult jobs on Wall Street. Because he enjoyed O’Neal’s support, this executive was allowed to build up an astonishing $30 billion position in CDOs on the firm’s balance sheet, at a time when all other Wall Street firms were desperately trying to exit the business. After O’Neal comes John Thain, the cerebral, MIT-educated technocrat whose rescue of the New York Stock Exchange earned him the nickname “Super Thain.” He was hired to save Merrill Lynch in late 2007, but his belief that the markets would rebound led him to underestimate the depth of Merrill’s problems. Finally, we meet Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, a street fighter raised barely above the poverty line in rural Georgia, whose “my way or the highway” management style suffers fools more easily than potential rivals, and who made a $50 billion commitment over a September weekend to buy a business he really didn’t understand, thus jeopardizing his own institution.

The merger itself turns out to be a bizarre combination of cultures that blend like oil and water, where slick Wall Street bankers suddenly find themselves reporting to a cast of characters straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies . BofA’s inbred culture, which perceived New York banks its enemies, was based on loyalty and a good-ol’-boy network in which competence played second fiddle to blind obedience.

Crash of the Titans is a financial thriller that puts you in the theater as the historic events of the financial crisis unfold and people responsible for billion of dollars of other people’s money gamble recklessly to enhance their power and their paychecks or to save their own skins. Its wealth of never-before-revealed information and focus on two icons of corporate America make it the book that puts together all the pieces of the Wall Street disaster.