A First Class Catastrophe
First Class Catastrophe Wins Best Business Book Honor from Strategy + Business
“The simple truth was that financial institutions could no longer be allowed to fail — the links among them were [in the words of Longstreth] ‘simply too extensive to prevent one failure from triggering another.’”
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Chicago Tribune: “First-Class Catastrophe” is the Perfect Gift!
“Henriques notes the crash was actually seven years in the making, and she also demonstrates how it was the predicate to the financial crisis of 2008. Sadly, investors, regulators and bankers failed to heed the lessons of 1987, even as the same patterns resurfaced.”
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NY Times Book Review
“Henriques gives us a gripping, almost minute-by-minute account of the weeks that followed, including the posturings, the denials and the panics, as well as the “web of trust, pluck and improvisation” that pulled the markets through.”
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Washington Post Review
“A first-class cautionary tale that should be on every financial regulator’s and policymaker’s desk — and many an investor’s, too.”
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Wall Street Journal Review of “A First-Class Catastrophe”
“a narrative history . . . rich in interviews and archival research and personalized with vivid descriptions of the actors and conflicts involved.”
“Her writing is so skillful that even mathematical risk-mitigation techniques and arcane turf wars . . . are infused with life.”
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Market Watch Review/Opinion
“Black Monday was the contagious crisis that the system nearly didn’t survive. All the key fault lines that trembled in 2008 … were first exposed as hazards in 1987.”
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Library Journal Review
“The author’s journalistic storytelling will bring a deeper understanding of Black Monday to all readers the same way Andrew Sorkin’s ‘Too Big To Fail’ did for the 2008 crisis.”
Shelf Awareness Review of “A First-Class Catastrophe”
“Henriques has a low-key style, favoring patient explanation over moral outrage. Still, her account subtly undermines the concept of rational markets–“human beings do not cope well in a crisis when speed, complexity, secrecy, and fear all batter our emotions at the same time”–while also making the case for pragmatic responses to financial crises.”
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Publisher’s Weekly Review
… a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why financial markets lurch from crisis to crisis and are still so frighteningly susceptible to crashes today.
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