The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System

by Charles Gasparino

Book Overview

In the spirit of Barbarians at the Gate and Liar's Poker comes The Sellout, the definitive book on the recent collapse of Wall Street, one of the most dramatic and anxiety-ridden era in national socioeconomic history. In this powerful business narrative, Charles Gasparino, the author of Blood on the Floor and King of the Club, captures how avarice, arrogance, and sheer stupidity eroded Wall Street's dominance, made many of our country's most fabled...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061697168
• ISBN13: 9780061697166
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Harper Business
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Well Written Well Researched...

I work in the industry and see Charles more often than not on my CNBC feed. Charles was to me a sort of fellow who was pretty even keel. When I received a copy of the book I was both interested and wondering if Charles would go over the top in terms trying to get your attention. What I read was an impressive book. The writing style was intelligent and not flamboyant. This book was neither in your face or trying to sell an agenda. It was written using the style, "it is what it is." This is what I liked about the book since as somebody who is working in the industry, I was fearing that Charles would take his best shots against us. Again, this book does not hide and try to sell the market's virtues as one Goldman Sachs CEO did. It tells it as it is, which is neither good nor bad. For me this book is comparable to "When Genius Failed", "Devil take the Hindmost", and "Against the Gods". If you like financial history as I do, then this book is for you. Good job Charles!

technically could be stronger but gets the essence

First off, I worked with or for many of the major characters (especially at Merrill, but also at Morgan Stanley). In particular I was at Merrill during the LTCM debacle and can say that amazingly Gasparino got the character of O'Neal, Kronthal, Kim, Semerci and Latannzio generally correct even in the earlier crisis. I remember O'Neal ripping a new orifice in Connie Voldstadt who headed European fixed income on a conference call in the fall of 1998, without O'Neal really even understanding the actual essence of the problem. Semerci was a salesguy who nearly blew up Turkish accounts with mis-sold derivative transactions in 1997-98, yet i can see O'Neal being enamoured with him and unbelievably putting him into a position that people 10 times smarter than him held 10 years earlier. Charlie goes soft on Osman. Dow Kim is another character that gets off relatively easy. Kronthal (and especially Bobby McCann ) comes off as better than he was, still considering the vast number of issues Gasparino got them fairly right. I think Gasparino covered most of the major issues, the lack of mark-to-market accounting, the hubris, and most importantly stupid assumption that many of us tried to warn various financial institutions was incorreect (that house prices can and do go down, but in 2004-2007 most mortgage involved people had almost a Jonestown belief that it couldn't happen and anyone who thought it could was defective). He gets it right that many of us were of the belief that Greenspans last act of integrity was in 1995 when he made his irrational exhuberance speach. He shows correctly that Robert Rubin was one of the most critical people involved in making the mess, though he doesn't talk about Rubin making a fortune at Goldman on Latin American Debt and then becoming Treasury Secretary under Clinton and bailing out the then exploding latin americans in 1994, effectively covering over his first involvement in a financial blow-up, which should have disqualified him from the further involvement he had in the latest fiancial disaster. On a technical level the book gets certain trades wrong (as almost every book on derivatives written by non-derivatives people i have ever read has done this - especially another generally good book, "When Genius Fails"). Still it doesn't detract from the generally accurate chronology and causality of the still evolving credit bubble.

FANTASTIC! A MUST READ!!!

What a riveting book! I don't know much about Wall Street and the financial system, but "The Sellout" broke it down in the simplest of terms. It was detailed and insightful without the erudite commentary one would expect from a book about Wall Street's financial meltdown. I loved the personal stories of the nations top CEO's and accounts of their oblivious meetings while the country's economy began cracking like a bad paint job! I felt like the proverbial "fly on the wall" as I read about secret wheelings and dealings and personal conversations among Wall Street's most influential players. The author demonstrates that he's a no-nonsense, straight shooter when it comes to reporting the story! He seems to be a smart outsider who has somehow managed to get the inside story! As complicated as the parts are, "The Sellout" does a great job breaking down every aspect of the financial and regulatory system that led us to this hot mess without making me feel like I took an Ambien! Quite a feat! Anyone interested in how and why the economy is in the state that it's in NEEDS to read this book!

Excellent insight into the reasons for the crisis

Rated 4.5 stars; rounded up. It's almost impossible to understand what happened on Wall Street in 2007 and 2008 without going back in time to the 1970s, the era in which investment banking changed forever. And that's what Gasparino does in this book, making it one of the most valuable books about the financial crisis published so far that the general reader is likely to find. Its nature is likely to come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the author only from his television appearances; while it has all the gossipy insights into Wall Street that Gasparino has always delivered (including Jimmy Cayne, the former CEO of Bear Stearns, offering him what Cayne described as a joint in an elevator one day...), it thankfully goes well beyond that. The scandalous tales about daily life on the Street are there to entertain and amuse us, sure, (along with a reasonable degree of self-promotion) but the author combines that with solid analysis and insight into the role played by the evolution of structured finance and the failures of risk management. Most significantly, Gasparino pays attention to history, specifically to the way that a handful of bond market honchos transformed the mortgage lending market from a local business into a Wall Street affair. He weaves together the strands of the narrative deftly, showing how politics in Washington and greed on Wall Street combined to turbo-charge the level of risk-taking and then a series of risk-management failures. Andrew Ross Sorkin's book,[...] is more elegantly written and works as a great chronicle of the months that lay between the collapse of Bear Stearns and the near-apocalypse of September 2008, six months later, but a lot of the historical context needed to understand why those events unfolded as they did is missing. In contrast, Gasparino tries to accomplish something more ambitious, explaining how risk moved from becoming a way to boost profits on Wall Street to being the heart of Wall Street's business. What happened to Wall Street wasn't just about subprime lending or leverage -- it's about why the creation of mortgage-backed securities and leverage became the heart of what Wall Street is all about. So far, the only books I've seen to have shed light on this issue aren't easily read by a general reader without a knowledge of finance or a high tolerance for jargon. [...] What Gasparino does is to present some of the same concepts in a gossipy, chatty book that should appeal to those on Main Street who are striving to understand just what happened and how it could happen. Gasparino's thesis is that government policy encouraged that risk-taking to reach extreme levels -- in the great debate over whether Washington or Wall Street is more to blame with the mess, he comes down on the side of blaming Wall Street. (I'm not sure I agree, but his argument is thoughtful, logical and well-supported by the facts that he musters.) He correctly identifies the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Man

The Sellout Will Prove To Be The Definitive Book on Wall St For Years to Come

While the Wall Street Journal review may have said it all, after reading every page of this fast-moving book I can say that,not only does it characterize the personalities of those who brought us this financial debacle in real time, but perhaps more importantly, puts that debacle into perspective. Charles Gasparino depicts a thirty year evolution of Wall Street away from its core responsibility of serving clients, whether they be investors or public corporations who it was to advise on securing capital. He shows us that, over time, those investors and corporations were cast aside in favor of Wall Street firms self-interestedly speculating for their own account. As an author and journalist he uniquely lacks the fawning reverence over the Wall Street CEO that the rest of the media perversely have shown, which has brought to the sad state we are in. He brings down to earth those who brought the economy to its knees, those same radically overpaid folks who run what is nothing other than a casino, now funded with taxpayer money. A must read for everyone, this book will prove to top the list for decades to come for anyone who seeks a perspective on what and who truly moves the market.