When we walked into the Four Seasons last night for the party celebrating the publication of Kate Kelly‘s Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street, we thought the candlelight was a nice ambient touch—turns out it was because the building had lost power, and behind the kitchen door we could see the arc of a flashlight waving wildly. (Still, kudos to the staff, who got everything out smoothly, and it was all excellent.) As the setting sun took away what little light there was left in the room, we managed to find a spot where the backup generators provided us with enough illumination to chat with the Wall Street Journal reporter about how she was able to turn this book around so quickly after the financial firm’s collapse, and then went back to full-time work at the paper the day after she handed in the manuscript to Portfolio.
“We wanted to get the book out quickly because we knew events were happening very fast in the marketplace,” she explained. “People seemed interested in what was going on in Wall Street and the markets, so for sure we wanted to get out quickly before there was a tsunami of books about broader issues and the crisis. We believed that Bear Stearns was the first domino to fall.”