Sympathy for the investment banker: who killed Bear Stearns? After all, it was you and me.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book review

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House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, by William D. Cohan, New York: Doubleday, 450 pages, $27.95

BearTrap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008, by Bill Bamber and Andrew Spencer, New York: Brick Tower Press, 225 pages, $24.95

HOW WOULD you like to make half a million dollars a year playing bridge? To understand the popularity of House of Cards, William D. Cohan's narrative of the collapse of Bear Stearns & Co., you must know that Jimmy Cayne--the leatherfaced former CEO of the giant investment bank, trading firm, and broker-dealer--employed not one but four lucky stiffs, at six-figure annual salaries, to play tournament cards with him.

The New York Times bestseller ably details how Bear Stearns was brought down last year by a combination of high leverage, overinvestment in bum mortgage-backed securities, and a snowballing loss of confidence. But fans mainly simmer with moral outrage at the book's depiction of an aloof, barely responsive tycoon playing cards at a swanky hotel while his company died and millions were plunged into poverty. In a more spacious age, Cayne might have been dubbed "colorful." Now his vices--which may also include careless oversight, ignorance of derivatives, serious staff mismanagement, pot smoking (really), sexist comments, and more--draw only scorn. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani notes that Cayne "often seemed more interested in playing golf and attending bridge tournaments than in tending to his company's business." Los Angeles Times employee Tim Rutten applauds Cohan's depiction of "eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals" with "the mentality of looters," whose "devastating heedlessness and wanton venality" make one "nostalgic for those stodgy-sober old guys in the pinstripes."

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And yet for all the vilification, Cayne is not the villain of Cohan's dense, heavily reported book. Nor does he emerge as the bad guy in BearTrap, a passionate cri de coeur by Bill Bamber, a former Bear senior managing director for derivatives, and literary agent Andrew Spencer. In both books, the insolvency of Bear Stearns occurs with a great indifference to who's hissable and who's kissable. While the plot involves plenty of bad decisions, it's really just a small record of one part of a madness that swept the entire financial sector, the U.S. government and its foreign enablers, and the biggest criminals of all, the American people.

Both books focus on the period from March 10 through March 17, 2008, when Bear Stearns, abandoned by customers and lenders, became insolvent and was consumed, with government help, by JPMorgan Chase. The similarity ends there. House of Cards is a very widely sourced, exhaustive narrative at the level of what the Avalon Hill board game company used to call "grand strategy." Its treatment of the fatal week is just a setup for a detailed...