Real time TV dramas have met their match in Street Fighters, real time reporting on the final 72 hours of Bear Stearns by the Wall Street Journal's Kate Kelly, published today by Penguin.  If you'd like to know who was on the other end of all those phone calls Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and New York Fed President Tim Geithner made in March, 2008 before "loaning" J P Morgan Chase $30 billion of your taxes to close its takeover of Bear Stearns, this book is for you.

Kelly interviewed those two and over 100 others to piece together what transpired hour by hour as Bear Stearns slipped away over three days.  She's not afraid to footnote disputed recollections or to pursue an absent board chair through a cloud of weed to a bridge tournament.  The narrative is fast-paced and authoritative.  The personalities are well developed without bogging down in detail.  Complexities, like credit default swaps, executive compensation, and executive suite infighting, are clearly and succinctly presented.  Best of all, Kelly maintains the suspense until the very last page.

You can't help hoping, for the sake of Bear's 14,000 employees, that something good could come of this for them.  From the inside, Bear Stearns' demise hardly seemed inevitable, although the vulnerabilities were clearly there.   At the end, you understand intellectually how it happened, but, like many who worked at Bear Stearns, you can't shake that gut feeling that, even with all that bad mortgage paper and way too much debt, the company was worth more than $2 on Monday following Friday's $30 close.  The suddenness with which it all transpired over 72 hours is a lesson to us all, and it's well told in Street Fighters.