Roland Arnall, a respected philanthropist and diplomat, who made his fortune
building Ameriquest, a subprime lending empire that relied on blatantly
deceptive lending practices.
Hank Greenberg, who built AIG into a Rube Goldberg contraption with an
undeserved triple-A rating, and who ran it so tightly that he was the only one
who knew where all the bodies were buried.
Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, aloof and suspicious, who suffered from
"Goldman envy" and drove a proud old firm into the ground by promoting
cronies and pushing out his smartest lieutenants.
Lloyd Blankfein, who helped turn Goldman Sachs from a culture that famously put
clients first to one that made clients secondary to its own bottom line.
Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae, who (like his predecessors) bullied regulators
into submission and let his firm drift away from its original, noble mission.
Brian Clarkson of Moody's, who aggressively pushed to increase his rating
agency's market share and stock price, at the cost of its integrity.
Alan Greenspan, the legendary maestro of the Federal Reserve, who ignored the
evidence of a growing housing bubble and turned a blind eye to the lending
practices that ultimately brought down Wall Street -- and inflicted enormous
pain on the country.
Just
as McLean's The Smartest Guys in the Room
was hailed as the best Enron book on a crowded shelf, so will All the Devils Are Here be remembered
for finally making sense of the meltdown and its consequences.
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