Download Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers AudioBook Free
When Jared Dillian joined Lehman Brothers in 2001, he fulfilled a life-long wish to make it on Wall Block - but he previously no idea how near to the edge the job would take him. Like Michael Lewis' common Liar's Texas holdem, Jared Dillian's Block Freak requires listeners behind the displays of the renowned Lehman Brothers, revealing its outrageous and often hilarious corporate and business culture. Within this ultracompetitive Ivy Little league world where men would flip over each other's ties to check out the labels, Dillian was an outsider as an ex-military, working-class guy in a Men's Wearhouse suit. But he was scrappy and determined; in interviews he told potential professionals that, "Nobody could work harder than me. No person is willing to put in the hours I will devote. I am insane." Since it turned out, on Wall Block insanity is not an undesired quality. Dillian increased from green affiliate, verifying IDs at the entry to the trading floor in the paranoid days following 9/11, to become an integral part of Lehman's culture in its last years as the firm's brain Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) trader. More than $1 trillion in riches approved through his hands, but at the price of an untold range of smashed telephones and tape dispensers. Over time, the exhilarating and explosively demanding job needed its toll on him. The extreme highs and lows of the trading floor masked and exacerbated the symptoms of Dillian's undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders, resulting in a unpredictable manner that eventually arrived him in a psychiatric ward. Dillian put his life again together, time for work healthier than previously, but Lehman itself experienced seemingly eliminated mad, having made outrageous wagers on commercial real house, and was quickly going for self-destruction. A raucous consideration of the final years of Lehman Brothers, from 9/11 at its World Financial Center office buildings through the firm's personal bankruptcy, including stunning portraits of trading-floor culture, the financial meltdown, and the business's ultimate collapse.
