Overleveraged, Overconfident

Robert Campeau: the man who bought Bloomingdale’s—and broke American retail doing it From a post-war Ottawa homebuilder to a swaggering 1980s dealmaker, Robert Campeau rode junk-bond rocket fuel to snag Allied Stores (1986) and then Federated Department Stores—owner of Bloomingdale’s (1988). The plan: use iconic retailers to anchor hulking real-estate plays. The problem: interest bills that cash f...

Meet Kenneth Mattson is the central figure in the implosion of an alleged $400 million real estate empire that prosecutors describe as a decade-long Ponzi scheme. He faces a raft of serious federal charges, including seven counts of wire fraud, one count of money laundering, and one count of obstruction of justice, to which he has pleaded not guilty. This episode was researched and written by Cher...

 As we dive into six decades of American financial hubris. We'll watch the same old play unfold. Hide the losses, budge the numbers, and believe your own story until the money dries up. We'll go from the smoky back rooms of the 1970s to today's glass-walled FinTech empires, because the rules may change, but the game never does. In the early 1970s, Franklin National Bank looked like...

What do you get when two Wall Street titans turn a financial feud into a public spectacle? An activist-investing meltdown that plays out like middle school drama—with $1 billion on the line. In this episode, we dive into the infamous slugfest between Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman over Herbalife , the company Ackman called a pyramid scheme—and Icahn called a golden opportunity to make him squirm. Expe...

This Spreadsheet Could Ruin Your Life (And Definitely Your Bonus) You think it’s just Excel—until it’s not. In this episode of Overleveraged, Overconfident , we unpack five real-world spreadsheet fails that triggered $24 million losses, $6 billion meltdowns, government investigations , and even global austerity policies . From Barclays hiding rows in a bankruptcy deal to Fannie Mae's $1.2 bil...

In the mid-2000s, a little-known banker named Osman Semerci rocketed from relative obscurity to Global Head of FICC at Merrill Lynch —not through decades of seasoning, but by threatening to walk . This episode dissects how Semerci’s audacity—and Merrill’s hunger for mortgage profits—fueled an era of breathtaking risk. We follow the arc from boardroom brinkmanship to the multibillion-dollar CDO bet...

When a half-billion-dollar investment goes sideways, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Meet JC Flowers and John Corzine—two Goldman Sachs alumni whose friendship survived boardroom betrayals, political scandals, and a spectacular fall from grace, but couldn't survive their own hubris. After Refco's spectacular 6-day collapse wiped out $3 billion in shareholder value, private...

What happens when a small-town hockey player from Minnesota’s Iron Range swaps his stick for a Bloomberg terminal and $26 billion in other people’s money? You get Phil Falcone—the hedge fund king who shorted subprime to riches, then torched it all, borrowing from his own fund, rigging bond markets, and backing a satellite network that nearly broke GPS nationwide. This is decision deafness in actio...