A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers,   ISBN:9780307588333

Customer Rating: 

The pleasure and enlightenment I derived from reading "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense" is in a class of its own. I am not employed in the financial sector and although I am a daily reader of the WSJ, I never fully grasped the fundamentals of the underlying financial "house of cards" created by the CDO and CDS instruments until I read this book. I have reached a point in my life where I only read non-fiction as I find it more enjoyable - and enlightening - than fiction. This book was more entertaining and could easily stand up to the many novels I have read in the past, written by authors including Frederick Forsythe, Robert Ludlum, Ken Follett, John Grisham, David Baldacci, Leon Uris and James Clavell. In my opinion, Mr. MacDonald is in pretty good company, especially considering that finance and entrepreneurship, not writing, are his primary talents. As works of business non-fiction go, I place this this book in the same league as Kurt Eichenwald's "Conspiracy of Fools" for an excellent narrative of business folly. As far as a Wall Street thriller, the only book that even comes close to "Colossal Failure" is James Stewart's "Den of Thieves."

The book's Prologue establishes the single most-important underlying factor leading to Lehman Brothers' demise - the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, almost ten years earlier. With the premise set, Mr. MacDonald's then begins his narrative with a concise autobirgraphical profile of his life leading up to his employment with Lehman Brothers. Not a child of privelege with an Ivy League legacy, the author is clearly a scrapper who attends a public university and works his butt off enroute to his Wall Street (really 7th Avenue) dream job. His early career successes, first as a frozen foods salesman (who becomes the company's top performer leading to a promotion to management which he ultimately declines), then as a top producing stock broker for Merril Lynch in Philadelphia and as a dot-com entrepeneuer who makes his first couple of million before he is 30, would typically be satisfying enough for most people. But not for Larry MacDonald. He had set his lifelong goal of getting to the epicenter of finance, to a bulge-bracket investment bank in NYC. With the help of a childhood friend, whose relationship with the author is well established early in the book, he lands a job as a bond trader at Lehman. From this "ring-side seat" he then meticulously but simply describes the events which lead to the fall of Lehman Brothers (as well as Bear Sterns,, Merril Lynch and AIG) and to the global economic meltdown of Septemebr 2008. He explains this in layman's terms and provides clarity to the many complex financial vehicles which combine to create the critical mass that's leads to the world's financial implosion. Along the way, the reader can sense the impending doom and is held in continual suspense (even though one knows the final outcome.) Throughout the book, I felt as if I personally knew the many characters because Mr. MacDonald does such an excellent job describing them. More importantly, I wanted to be with them during their many financial adventures. Reading this book was the next best thing to actually being there.

Customer Rating: 

First, Lehman was certainly not "the greatest" nor the most prestigious investment bank "Wall Street had ever seen"...that is just rubbish. The 2nd thing that quickly stood out on the 1st page or 2nd was incorrect English usage....using "disrespect" as a verb...very low class..why did editors allow this?
This book is for people who want a breathless and unreliable account guiding them through the Lehman debacle. AWV Graham

Customer Rating: 

These two authors pen a thrilling and well written insider account of Lehman's collapse. Fools abound, villains are tarred and feathered, heroes lauded, tragedies laid bare, strange financial terms and roads to riches revealed and the insider's emotional and psychic catharsis given air. McDonald's subjectivity might have succumbed to a publicized rant except for the deft writing of Robinson who knows how to turn a phrase and lubricate the storyline to bring facts and authority to the reader.

Customer Rating: 

This book is fairly easy to follow. It starts out with the authors life and how he ended up at Lehman's. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I thought this part of the book was integral to the rest of the story. It really made the story personal, so that I was right there with the author, through all of his successes and failures. I laughed and cried with him. It was not a dry factual book that is so boring, you can hardly make yourself pick it up. I stayed up half the night to finish it, but finally had to go to bed. Then, I woke up the next morning early, and like a child at Christmas, could not go back to sleep until I finished reading it. As other reviewers have commented, he has interviewed numerous people to get his facts, and his facts are correct!! There is no conjecture here, he has dates time and numbers, all in the correct order. This book will make you run the gamut of emotions, and in the end, you will be terrified that this could have happened in the USA, and you will wonder when (not if, when) this will happen again.

Customer Rating: 

Takes a very complicated subject to a new level of simplicity. There is no free lunch.
There is no free money. What wall street or Washington or Sacramento borrows
has to be repaid.You can not lend money to people who cannot ever pay it back.
No doc loans ie insufficient income loans are government stupidity.