Publisher Description
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s website
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s interview on Charlie Rose
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Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world’s economy.
“We’ve got to get some foam down on the runway!” a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world’s financial system would experience.
Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing neverdisclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were “too big to fail,” it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.
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“There’s a variety of military history sometimes called “maps and chaps”— often vivid, well-researched, and well-written —that tells you everything that happened in a given battle or campaign, but without any context in politics or social costs. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big To Fail” is a kind of maps ‘n’ chaps version of the Global Economic Meltdown of the Year Eight— a vivid, well-researched, very well-written account of the events that led up to financial chaos in September and October of the Year Eight and culminated with the TARP program and the effective nationalisation of a number of major banks and brokerages. Sorkin takes us inside the boardrooms and the Fed, and conveys the sense of panic and desperation and frenzied emergency dealmaking of those weeks. But it’s all a bit…abstracted. Sorkin never really explains why all this is happening. It’s like an account of Bonaparte’s career that never really mentions the French Revolution or its effects. Sorkin’s heroes— especially Hank Paulson at Treasury, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke at the Fed, and Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan —dash across the pages making deals and fighting off disaster. But there’s no real sense of what’s gone wrong with the financial system— no description of the monsters lurking out beyond Midtown Manhattan and what created them.
Assuming that Sorkin’s informants and interviewees are mostly truthful, the story is one without many obvious villains. Even Dick Fuld at Lehman comes across as more hapless and clueless than anything else, as does Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman. The heads of the great banks and brokerages do seem to care about their employees and staffs, but they only vaguely understand what’s happened in the markets and never understand the depth of post-bailout populist anger.
“Too Big To Fail” is about how catastrophe was averted, but it’s a view that doesn’t explain the reasons for financial collapse, and it doesn’t look at the effects the meltdown had beyond the windows of office towers in New York. Sorkin has written a fine account of what happened in the autumn of 2008, but it’s like battle history that’s only about generals and their maps, with no context and no history.”
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DoctorM (4 out of 5 stars)
