Business Books

The End of Wall Street

Roger Lowenstein (Penguin Press; 339 pages)

If a novelist lined up as many dramatic events as the author does here, his work would be blasted as contrived. Lowenstein, a magnificent business writer, creates an almost novelistic accounting of the all-too-real 2008 financial collapse. The book opens in late summer: Lehman Brothers is a hairbreadth away from collapse, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been taken over by the feds, and AIG is veering toward disaster. After several decades of laissez-faire regulation, Wall Street is crying out to be rescued by the government.

The irony is overpowering, says Lowenstein. "Less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when prevailing orthodoxy held that the free market could govern itself, and when financial regulation seemed destined for near irrelevancy, the United States was compelled to socialize lending and mortgage risk, and even the ownership of banks, on a scale that would have made Lenin smile."

Lowenstein is terrific at walking the reader through complex economic events, and he artfully traces the development of the subprime-mortgage disaster. It sounds like a lofty ideal when Angelo Mozilo, a co-founder of Countrywide, says in a speech in 2003, "Expanding the American dream of homeownership must continue to be our mission, not solely for the purpose of benefiting corporate America, but more importantly, to make our country a better place." Countrywide and others made mortgages available to anyone with a pulse, aided and abetted by Wall Street, which created the market for exotic mortgage derivatives. By 2008, "banks and investors had plied the average American with mortgage debt on such speculative and unthinking terms that not just America's economy but the world's economy ultimately capsized."

Lowenstein has a pitch-perfect sense of the Street's monumental recklessness. The chorus line of overpaid bad actors in this book is endless. Held out for particular scorn is Lehman CEO Richard Fuld, who has "the daring of a gambler who believes, deep down, that he will always be able to play the last card." Maybe he did, yet as the book impressively shows, Fuld lost. We all did.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Is anyone in charge here? Wall Street as we knew it failed and needs a reboot.

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

Walter Kiechel III (Harvard Business; 347 pages)

Kiechel, a former managing editor of FORTUNE, hails the rise of strategy, saying it has eclipsed "any other change worked in the intellectual landscape of business over the past 50 years." The "lords" are Bruce Henderson of BCG, Bill Bain of Bain & Co., Fred Gluck of McKinsey and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. He traces their quest to understand how companies gain competitive advantage. The strategy revolution, Kiechel writes, "features a rowdy parade of ideas and analytical techniques jostling each other down the historical road."

THE BOTTOM LINE: Who says that business is anti-intellectual?

Thank You for Firing Me! How to Catch the Next Wave of Success After You Lose Your Job

Kitty Martini and Candice Reed (Sterling; 232 pages)