One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What
happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail with aftershocks that rocked the
global economy? In this news-making often astonishing book a former Lehman Brothers Vice
President gives us the straight answers-right from the belly of the beast. In A Colossal
Failure of Common Sense Larry McDonald a Wall Street insider reveals the culture and
unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human
story of Larry McDonald's Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts gateway to nowhere
housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers home of one of the world's
toughest trading floors. We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse
especially those who saw it coming with a helpless angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at
the top whose reckless pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation'
s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place where
brilliance arrogance ambition greed capacity for relentless toil and other human traits
combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it. The full
significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is
certain: it was a devastating blow to America's-and the world's-financial system. And it need
not have happened. This is the story of why it did.
