I love this book. I don't know if there's a better written book on the Milken saga than this one, but I can pretty much say this one is definitive.

For those not immediately familiar with the story here, this details the rise and fall of Michael Milken, who along with his firm Drexell-Burnham and many others, such as Ivan Boesky (on whom Gordon Geko was based), created an era of Wall Street corruption in the 80's that may have only been equalled recently in the run up to the 2008 crash. These are the guys that made excess cool and corruption king, and their story is as page turning and entertaining as can be.

What follows in the book is a great accounting of how the pieces in this puzzle came together. From their easterly upbringings and introduction to the financial world, to their fateful decisions to embrace the dark side of finance in search of profits and thrills. It covers the steely and determined fifteenth affected of the SEC and others involved in the years long pursuit of these men and the methods by which they caught them and ask the while introduces the reader to a height of excess that can't really be believed, but it's completely true.

Very entertaining saga on the insider trading activities going on in Wall Street in the 1980s, and the SEC's and Justice Department's role in bringing them down. Book culminated in the downfall of Michael Milliken, the Junk Bond King. All the characters started as law abiding citizens, and then slowly got wrapped up in greed and took more and more illegal measures to fill that greed. I really enjoyed Stewart's writing style, as it made the book read more like fiction. The book is incredibly well researched, and has to be the best capture of this period on Wall Street.

It was interesting to return to this book over twenty years after first reading it. For some reason I consumed the many tales of greed that were published at the time...Barbarians at the Gate, Mr. Diamond, Liar's Poker. A decade later there was the spate of books on Enron, Tyco, ADM. A few short years after that it would be the financial crisis that produced written works to explain the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and others. And let's not forget the Madoff saga.

Author Stewart asks in his Epilogue, could something similar to the Boesky, Levine, Seigel, and Milken insider trading ever happen again. The events mentioned above certainly indicate so. History repeats itself because greed always exists. Still, it is amazing at the dollar values that were involved back then along with the hubris and shock when these dealings were exposed. This is a brilliantly researched and written cautionary tale that many refused to heed.

"Den of Thieves" offers a fascinating account of the insider trading scandals of the 1980s. Although the scandal occurred nearly 40 years ago, many of the characters in the book remain prominent today (Boesky only passed away recently, and Milken continues to be a key figure at the Milken Institute’s annual conference). Their stories continue to inspire both financiers and criminals. Without Milken, tales like "Barbarians at the Gate" might never have emerged, and figures like Jho Low might never have aspired to become the "Billion Dollar Whale." It is captivating to read about events that continue to have a lasting impact on our lives today.

Bit too long and detailed for my taste. Probably very accurate, but gets quite burdensome to try to keep up with all the characters and companies involved.

Book split into two, first doing finance and insider trading then catching the bad guys and charging them with crimes. The second half especially was difficult to follow with just the sheer amount of lawyers and prosecutors etc.

Not bad, but would have enjoyed a bit shorter if a version more.

4/5

Great account of the greed in 80’s Wall Street, loved hearing the detail of Millikan and Boesky. Learned a lot about arbitrage, insider trading, improved knowledge of junk bonds, super interesting account of financial history. I think Liars Poker was kind of like a warmup to this book in the way it goes in chronological order detailing the perspectives of different characters and their thievery. “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” In this context, 100% accurate. In today’s financial markets, probably much less accurate but if there’s one takeaway from this book it’s that at some point it doesn’t even become about the money, it’s about the power.

Not ashamed to say this tale of Michael Milken's 1980s junk-bond shenanigans was one of the more entertaining books I have ever read. 500 pages but it flies by. The kind of detail Stewart has extracted from the records is pretty amazing. Milken unsurprisingly comes off as a grandiose, power and wealth-hungry egomaniac but still the extent of his achievement is pretty impressive. Highly recommended for a good summer read.

DNF @ 2%. Real talk, I am never gonna read all this. I tried. Felt like I was at 2% for AGES. I’m just going to watch a YouTube on it and call it a day. Cos this a lot, bro.

Absolutely not going to rate this cos I’m just going to flip it open to a chapter here and there and learn things, but I’m just going to treat it as a bible of financial scandal and greed rather than a book I actually sit down and read cover to cover cos I have 0 patience to read all this. My GOD. How long is the audiobook version of this, even, cos maybe that’s the way to look? OK, just looked it up on Spotify… 19 hours and 35 mins. You know… maybe I could listen to a chapter a day? Like each chapter is 1-1.5 hours? But nah… I like using my eyeballs so reading it is, ugh. I’m torn.

Alright, listened to the 5 min sample on Spotify. I might do it. Not today but some day.

Only three stars not because the book was poorly written, which it was not, or because it was insufficiently researched, which it was not, but because the characters were despicable. What's worse, the characters are real people - shameless, unprincipled crooks. Who did not get what they deserve.

It's a very good book, but I gave it three stars because it's so heavily documented. The subtext of the whole book is "these horrible people did this horrible thing, and probably no one will ever do anything this horrible again". Well, that seems like a pretty naive way for an experienced Wall Street Journal reporter to look at it. And of course in light of what's happened since then, the bad behavior of Mike Milken and Ivan Boesky seems relatively benign compared to the actions that led to 2008. And if you've read Michael Lewis' The Big Short, his account of a much more complex series of events is actually a little easier to follow than this book. It's almost like Stewart felt that he was writing a book so that history could look back and find everything it needed to know about the Junk Bond era; he overpacked it with so much information that it's almost numbing to read it. But it's good enough that I finished it, quickly.

This is a fascinating look at the 1980's securities industry and reads like a thriller...

Fascinating...though there are a *lot* of names to keep track of. Of all the characters, Milkin probably comes off the worst, and (IMHO) he got off incredibly easily for (a) the damage he did to Drexel, and (b) the damage he did to the economy. He certainly didn't deserve his 2020 pardon, but I'm not surprised Trump would do it, since he probably admires Milkin for managing to keep so much of the proceeds.

The inside look at the workings of the SDNY attorney's office and SEC enforcement was interesting, especially in the political calculations (who gets immunity, the various calculations that go into a plea, how prosecutors won't even file a case unless they feel confident they can convince a jury).