Penguin.com (usa)

With a style as riveting as it is enlightening, Street Fighters is the definitive account of a once-great firm's demise, and the human folly that led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

Meet the street fighters of Bear Stearns . . .

Jimmy Cayne, chairman

The ultimate PSD, Cayne spent four decades at Bear, eventually becoming its public face. But his narrow approach to the business—combined with a penchant for frequent vacations and edgy behavior—eroded trust in the company when it was desperately needed.

A career investment banker, Schwartz was at a conference in Palm Beach when the run on his company took off. In the days that followed, he struck outsiders as a "deer in the headlights," unable to employ the savvy deal-making skills he had spent years honing.

The hopelessly disorganized CFO continued to assert that Bear's liquidity was strong, even as he privately feared the worst. Even with investors and lenders demanding answers, his hardest call to field came from his eldest daughter, who was crying after hearing of Bear's death spiral.

He was a penny-pincher and an amateur philosopher whose careful management took the firm to dazzling heights. But after being unseated in a palace coup, he could only watch helplessly as his beloved firm crashed.

Baffled that other regulators had not seen Bear's problems coming, Geithner and a small group of associates faced the task of saving investors from financial Armageddon.

Irate over Bear's myopic management, the Treasury secretary wanted company officials to pay for their greed and inattention. But to prevent disaster in the markets, he encouraged an unheard-of government bailout at odds with his own principles.

Buying Bear was the most wrenching deal of this shrewd and sharp-tongued executive's career. To capture a coveted collection of businesses, he went mano a mano with both Bear and the federal government.