Bear Stearns survived the stock market crash of 1929 without laying off a single person. The Wall Street firm also made it through the Great Depression, the stock market crash of 1987 and the tech bubble of the 1990s.
But a year ago this month, Bear Stearns, one of the biggest investment banks in the United States, failed — a victim of the subprime mortgage crisis it helped create.
The company's meltdown is described by William Cohan in a new book, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. Cohan talks to Steve Inskeep about the fall of Bear Stearns and one of the figures in the center of it all: then-Chairman Jimmy Cayne.
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