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The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time and How to Survive It

The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time and How to Survive It

We’re in the midst of the greatest financial crisis of our time. Do you know what really happened? Are you prepared for what’s to come?

When every headline delivers bad news, and each morning market bell seems to usher in yet another bank debacle, stock market plunge or dire warning about the end of access to credit; threats to our savings and security; and the collapse of the entire financial system as we know it. . . . It’s hard to keep up.

But we can’t afford to be in the dark just because we can no longer bear to turn on the news.

Written by seasoned financial writer Dave Kansas, The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It makes sense of the madness, revealing how the crisis is affecting our financial lives and what steps we should take to inform and protect ourselves. This comprehensive, practical and accessible book delivers:

• An inside look at the financial wizardry, easy money and overconfidence that drove the subprime crisis, credit crunch and market meltdown
• An analysis of the New World Order—the banking behemoths, the government’s role—and how it will affect Main Street
• A look at what’s safe: a rundown of which investments are protected and which aren’t and how fund protection has changed
• Individual investor strategies: stocks, bonds, retirement and real estate (and whether you should think seriously about “the mattress”)

From the most authoritative source for business and economic news and written by one of the most trusted voices in financial reporting, The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It is the only book you’ll need to navigate the storm ahead.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars A Guide for the rest of us…
There is a widening chasm between Wall Street and Main Street and the causes seem to get more complex by the day.

Kansas does a great job of unraveling the mysteries and making it readable for the average guy on Main Street (me).

I picked this up at the airport in Kansas City and was finished by the time the plane touched down in Dallas. The book discusses the connection between greed and risk then lays out in simple prose how that connection went horribly awry.

Many of us have read how derivatives played a central role in the collapse of banks and other institutions, but until now, there hasn’t been a simple explanation.

Here is a chapter list:

1. More Risk Is Simply More Profit

2. Financial Wizardry

3. Canaries

4. Tsunami

5. The New World Order

6. What is Safe

7. Debt and Destruction

8. On Investment Strategy

THE END OF WALL STREET… uses simple stories to bring it all into focus. The causes…the effects…where we are now.

I would highly recommend it.

If you are like me; once you realize what got us into this mess, you will be more motivated than ever to “keep it down the middle of the fairway.” A great book for helping you to do that is:Are There Cracks In Your Nest-Egg?: A Quick and Easy Guide for Building and Preserving Wealth. If the Wall Street types had stayed out of the deep grass and stuck with investment basics, we wouldn’t be here.

3 Stars There Is Something In the Woods
A short interesting book with the flavor of fictional stories. However, there is no way to test the credibility of the events and the reader does not know how much of each story is true. Each chapter describes a different incident and in a different location. However, the book is a fun read at bed time and asks some interesting questions about reported strange phenomonen.

5 Stars Making Sense of What Has Happened to Our economy
Great book to read if you want get an understanding of the current state of affairs with our economy. I strongly urge everyone to read the facts and don’t necessarily rely on the hype you get from the main stream media.

4 Stars 4.5 stars-Banker financed speculation inflated the bubble that crashed
The author has done a very good job of explaining the whys,hows and whats of the current financial catastrophe .The basic problem can be traced back to the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to the Carter and Reagan administrations deregulation and privativation agendas.The problem was then exacerbated in the George H W Bush,Clinton-Gore,and George W. Bush-Cheney administration.Huge numbers of University of Chicago type economists and business school academics were hired ,who did not believe in any kind of regulation at all,by the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) Federal Reserve System (FRS),Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation(FDIC),Office of Thrift Supervision,etc.These individuals believed in a pseudo theory called the Efficient Market Hypothesis(EMH).This theory asserted ,without any empirical,historical,or statistical support or goodness of fit tests to support it,that all financial markets are normally distributed around a stable mean.The conclusions of this pseudo theory,still taught to every MBA candidate in finance worldwide and every PH.D candidate in every economics department,are that (a) bubbles are not possible,(b) financial markets are self regulating,(c) risk management techniques ,based on the Mean -Variance model,the Capital Asset Pricing Model(CAPM),and the Black-Scholes equation for valuing put and call options,will create an efficient market where speculation on a massive scale can be engaged in using debt leverage to maxomize profits ” safely “. Benoit Mandelbrot, Nassim Nichlas Taleb,and George Soros, like D Ellsberg and J M Keynes before them,demonstrated that there is no support for this pseudo theory.The EMH is very similar to Ptolomaic astronomy.It is a completely artificially created and constructed theory based on a priori claims and assertions that have ,as noted above,been disproved in a world of uncertainty (Keynes,Ellsberg,Soros) and wild risk (Mandelbrot,Taleb).

The scary part is that Bernanke and Geithner are or were advocates of this falsified theory.The people who allowed the private commercial bankers to put through their speculative securitization schemes are the same people who are ,supposedly,going to clean up the mess.The bailouts will not work.All banks whose balance sheets contain huge amounts of these speculative assets should be closed down.The stock and bond holders should be wiped out.The same goes for all upper management.Whatever good assets remain on their books should be sold off to financial institutions whose balance sheets have not been eroded by speculative finance based on securitization and risk models that have failed completely.

5 Stars Learn from this Crisis and make it Your Opportunity
I stopped cold when I saw “The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It” on a bookstand in the Pittsburgh Airport in January 2009. Browsing through it, not only could I scarcely believe how quickly it was written and brought to market, I could barely believe how clearly it outlined our current economic environment.

Another thing became clear - that Dave Kansas, from his perch as a journalist with The Wall Street Journal, TheStreet.com, and FiLife is one of the few writers who could have written this book.

Kansas captures the historical background to the cataclysmic month of October 2008 using the recent examples of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russian crisis of 1998, the U.S. internet and technology bubble of 2000-2001. More pointedly, he delves into the implosion of hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), the shortsighted policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the creation of, and dependence on, credit-default swaps (CDSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs).

Kansas’s conclusion: October 2008 was predictable. In fact, many of the firms swirling at the epicenter of the current crisis knew they had serious trouble brewing, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take action to avert their fate.

In early 2009, nothing can hide how much our world, let alone the financial markets, has literally changed overnight. Venerable financial firms have either ceased to exist or been swallowed up by stronger, more prudent, players. We are all left to deal with the aftermath.

We’ve got to deal with the aftermath as we deal with our individual and collective behavior. I say that because most of us have scant knowledge of the role that complex financial products played in this mess and, to a large degree, that’s okay. What’s not okay is our intimate, yet often unrecognized or unacknowledged, knowledge of our human frailties. Human frailties that Kansas intimates underlie the real problem.

As human beings, we do chase returns. We do act on our greed and overconfidence. We are often guilty of employing hope rather than sound strategy. And, if human beings approach the financial market in this way, what does that portend for a financial system run by human beings?

I learned a great deal from “The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It.” I found it as important as a chronicle of the human frailties that led to our current crisis as it is an explanation of the nuts and bolts of how it happened. It cut through the hype and explained very complex terms in a straight forward and easily understood manner. But, it went even further by aiming to arm me with usable information.

The bottom line is it’s a true feat to produce a book this good so quickly. My only question is: Will we, individually and collectively, learn from it just as quickly?

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