This is William D Cohan’s third weighty volume of Wall Street history and I fell upon it eagerly, having very much enjoyed its predecessors. The Last Tycoons (2007) was his award-winning ‘secret history’ of Lazard Frères, the very private investment banking firm where Cohan himself worked as a young corporate financier. It was followed by House of Cards (2009), which took the lid off another big but by then bankrupt name on the Street – Bear Stearns. Both were memorable especially for the portraits of the giant individual egos that gave these firms their corporate characters.

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