We tore through the first big Bear Stearns book this year, William Cohan’s House of Cards, in hopes of some substantiation of reports that the bank’s former CEO (and former billionaire; he’s now a “mere eight figure-aire) Jimmy Cayne liked to smoke weed. But Cohan skipped the issue entirely, as he had in a Fortune interview with Cayne last year. We might say we read those 468 pages in vain, except that we are not convinced marijuana played a significant role in the financial crisis, especially since the Cayne depicted and quoted by Cohan sounds more like an angry drunk than a stoner. Here’s an abridged version of his rant about then-New York Fed President Tim Geithner:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=142877