Business Books

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

By Charles Gasparino

HarperBusiness; 553 pages

Charlie Gasparino's résumé is jam-packed: on-air editor for CNBC and contributor to the Daily Beast, the New York Post and Forbes. But at least one Wall Street executive has a different description: "A monumental asshole, who added dramatically to the financial instability during '08 and early '09." Gasparino's news bulletins (or rumormongering, depending on your view) on CNBC during that period often moved the market. He's well aware of the animosity. "They don't like the fact that I called them on the carpet," he told me. "I mean, you are not going to see a lot of Wall Street guys hanging out at my book party."

He's pretty much taken care of that with the title alone. His suspenseful blameography reads like a thriller, even though we already know how things turned out. The Sellout traces the arc of Wall Street's ultimate blowup, from the risk-taking free-for-all that began in the late 1970s through the emergence of complex mortgage-backed securities (which Gasparino labels a "financial cancer") to angry laid-off Lehman Brothers employees packing up their desks a year ago.

Gasparino is one of the Street's war correspondents and at his best when describing the fall of Lehman. It's the key battle, in a sense, since Lehman was a major force behind the subprime-mortgage bonds that were the culprits in the collapse. Gasparino is particularly good at capturing--via the profane, telling quote--the high-noon drama of the meltdown. When Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack tells Lehman boss Dick Fuld, "There are rumors that you guys are in trouble," Fuld, the "Gorilla of Wall Street," answers with tough-guy bravado, "It's bullshit." Lehman's stock price was soon in free fall.

After the firm imploded, friends of Fuld's worried not only about the spread of the financial disaster worldwide but also about his safety, as enraged employees, who had invested their life savings in now worthless company stock, cleared out. Though Wall Street, with government intervention, survived, Gasparino has plenty of finger-pointing to offer. He argues, for instance, that the SEC should be disbanded because of "the false sense of security it provides." Then again, after reading this book, you're not likely to be that susceptible anymore.

Your Brain at Work

By David Rock

HarperBusiness; 288 pages

Ever feel guilty that you can't do six things at once as some co-workers seem to? Don't. We're not made to multitask, says consultant Rock, who interviewed 30 leading neuroscientists to explore how the brain functions at work. "The reality is you are not doing two tasks that use the stage at any one time," he writes. "You are switching attention between tasks." For optimal use of brain cells, do one thing at a time, no matter how long your to-do list is. Otherwise, he says, "if you do multiple conscious tasks at once, you will experience a big drop-off in accuracy or performance." In other words, put down that cell phone immediately.

How Capitalism Will Save Us

By Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames

Crown Business; 357 pages