A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers »

LAWRENCE G. McDONALD is a managing director of Pangea Capital Management LP. He was, until 2008, vice president of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers. He ran an extremely successful joint venture between the firm’s fixed income and equity divisions and was one of Lehman’s most consistently profitable traders. McDonald is also cofounder of Convertbond.com, named by Forbes magazine as “Best of the Web” from 2000 to 2003, specifically citing it as the Web’s premier source for convertible securities information, valuation, and news.
 
PATRICK ROBINSON wrote Lone Survivor with the U.S. Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell.

From the Hardcover edition.

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now.  What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers--right from the belly of the beast.

In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald's Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts "gateway to nowhere" housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world's toughest trading floors.
 
We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor...

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Mr. McDonald's book gives the reader a visceral sense of what it was like to work at Lehman Brothers and the fateful decisions and events that led to the company's death spiral—decisions that turned the once-proud firm into a grim illustration, in the words of one of the author's colleagues, of the "colossal failure of common sense."

Prologue 1

1 A Rocky Road to Wall Street 9

2 Scaring Morgan Stanley to Death 34

3 Only the Bears Smiled 57

4 The Man in the Ivory Tower 81

5 A Miracle on the Waterway 106

6 The Day Delta Air Lines Went Bust 131

7 The Tragedy of General Motors 156

8 The Mortgage Bonanza Blows Out 182

9 King Richard Thunders Forward 210

10 A $100 Million Crash for Subprime's Biggest Beast 241

11 Wall Street Stunned as Kirk Quits 266

12 Fuld, Defiant to the End 296

Epilogue 327

Acknowledgments 341

Index 343