This is the story of how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Federal Reserve tried but failed to head off the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 as told in the voices of the principal players. Just after I read this book I began reading Lords of Finance, a similar tale about the failure of the national bankers in the 1920's to head of the crash of '29. Both stories have a similar ring: the adults come in to restore order after the children get out of hand, but the "adults" in both cases underestimate the power of events and overestimate their authority. In 2008 the institutions underestimated the amount of so-called risk in the system because they could not control the financial commitments the players had made, to the tune of trillions of dollars. In the 20's, bank regulators could not control the volume of credit flowing into the US stock market from foreign sources. What does this mean? And is there any similarity to the current threat of sovereign default in the European system? If money is not the promise of something being there when a debt is called, what is the nature of money, paper or otherwise? Here we have the dilemma of modern finance: when people and governments promise wealth or social security nets it is really not the promise of something that is real, but something that is wished for, not so unlike a gambling casino. We try to set up toll booths to regulate the promise-making machines, bank regulators, government auditors, credit-rating agencies, and the like, but the institutions cannot protect us against our fantasies getting ahead of reality. That we overcommit ourselves and our institutions is not so bad, after all, because optimism is a constituent of human nature it seems. Greed likewise is hard-wired into us. It greases the wheels of commerce. I'd hate to think of a world where we were not optimists. My business would certainly fail, so would many others. I'm not seeing any grand solutions in these books, but I sure am getting a dose of reality. ( )

I always used to say that life was too short for bad movies or cheap beer, but with books I had an ironclad and perhaps foolish rule: you make a commitment to read it all the way to the end. Not so with Too Big to Fail; for once (okay, twice), I broke that promise.

I've been working in financial services for over two years now, and was then employed for a company that went down spectacularly in flames during the crash. It was important for me to read something that tried to make sense of the Wall Street chaos.

This isn't that book. There's only the most cursory discussion of credit-default swaps, for instance -- for explanations, NPR's Planet Money, or The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, does a far better job -- and for all of Sorkin's attention to detail throughout, one doesn't get a good sense of how everything is connected.

The book is also terribly formulaic. By the third chapter or so the schema is set: introduce yet another person, describe their backgrounds (disappointingly uniform, I must say), add some detail about their culinary habits or the car they drive or The Moment They Received the Fateful Phone call, then move on to the next COO (either the one about to be replaced, or the replacement). With a cast of characters as long as a business account's legal disclosure, it isn't immediately clear why each one is relevant other than the fact that they spoke to Sorkin for the record.

Sorkin has a good handle on what creates tension within a scene, but there's no disguising the fact that most of the action takes place in boardrooms and offices. (If this were a film, we'd at least get an unconvincing montage of people staring at computer screens to gussy up the action, but there's no opportunity for that here.)

What kept me doggedly reading the next few chapters after that wasn't some narrative hook, ultimately, but the nagging, guilty, post-crash feeling of frugality that I spent good money on this, and that I could at least squeeze a few more minutes of entertainment out of it. But "life is short" won the day. ( )

There are few people alive today that experienced the onset of the Great Depression nor seeing reactions in real time or the in-depth analysis of financiers, pundits, government officials, and politicians however that isn’t the case for the beginning of the Great Recession. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin that provides an overview of the 2007-8 financial crisis from the aftermath of the sale of Bear Stearns to the creation of TARP.

The main figures throughout the book are Treasury Secretary Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson and his staff, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Tim Geithner though throughout the first half of the book the major secondary figure was Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. While Sorkin covers all the threads of the slowly deteriorating of the economic environment, it’s Fuld and Lehman Brothers that is focus due to their bankruptcy leading to one of---if the most---tumultuous weeks on Wall Street, in Washington, and around the world in financial history. Let’s be clear, there are no heroes presented just people finding their worldviews getting a serious reality check as they stare into the abyss. Through Fuld is in no way a sympathetic individual, Sorkin’s writing does make him a tragic figure whose efforts to save his company were at times undermined by his own brash bravado to the point that in the end his subordinates cut him out of the increasingly futile efforts to save the company. Though originally written and published a little over a year after the dark days of September and October 2008, there is some fuzziness on the state of the world then when viewed 15 years later and the afterworld written for this 10th anniversary edition only shows a little of the long-term effects and aftershocks that are affecting the world today.

Too Big to Fail chronicles the inside story of how the financial system imploded even as Wall Street and Washington struggled to save it. Andrew Ross Sorkin portrays the situation in understandable terms and presents the participants as people struggling against a situation that undermines their preconceived notions without prejudice or favor. ( )

Pretty gripping, almost thriller-ish. Made me appreciate the hard work of the Feds though I don't feel much better about the bankers who got us into the mess and still haven't paid a price for it. ( )

“At its core Too Big to Fail is a chronicle of failure - a failure that brought the world to its knees and raised questions about the very nature of capitalism. It is an intimate portrait of the dedicated and often baffled individuals who struggled… to spare the world and themselves an even more calamitous outcome. It would be comforting to say that all the characters depicted in this book were able to cast aside their own concerns… and join together to prevent the worse from happening. But as you’ll see, in making their decisions, they were not immune to the fierce rivalries and power grabs that are part of the long-established cultures on Wall Street and in Washington. In the end this drama is a human one, a tale about the fallibility of people who thought they themselves were too big to fail.”

This book follows the key people and businesses involved in the 2008 Financial Crisis. It goes into the details of conversations, conference calls, executive-level meetings, deals that almost took place, and who said what. It documents the sequence of events from the time of the initial warning bells, the fall of Bear Stearns, and ends with the “bailout” and its immediate aftermath. It takes the reader behind the scenes of the financial markets and is based upon hundreds of interviews. Published in 2009, it does not analyze the reasons behind the collapse, other than at a very high level.

The author focuses in on Lehman Brothers and, to a lesser extent, on American International Group (AIG) as the centerpiece of the narrative. There is a very large cast of characters (a helpful list is provided), which can occasionally be a bit overwhelming, but overall, I found it an easy-to-follow, page-turning chronicle. Sorkin sticks to the facts with little editorializing. It contains plenty of business and financial jargon and could have benefited from a bit more explanation for those not fully versed in these topics. It is a lengthy book (over 600 pages) and I think a few details (such as who drinks what types of beverages), could have been eliminated and not lost any of the important information. Recommended to anyone with a desire to understand the chain of events during the Financial Crisis. ( )

Almost exactly 2 years later. Still pretty good. Still, I think, gives the perpetrators a lot of credit. ( )

Written as if the author was an omnipresent, mind-reading ghost. The dramatization strains credulity. I appreciate some of the amusing vignettes (true or not) like the one when bankers stuck in traffic just drive down the cycling lane but it's so gratuitous. To be fair the author never claims to be impartial. ( )

Straightforward and informative account of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, with side-views of the doings at Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch. Fairly even-handed, insofar as the management of Lehman's deserves even-handedness. ( )

The book has a very good perspective but does not say more than what you would get from the internet or news. The gossip style writing feels overwhelming at some points in the book. ( )

Received from Helen

Somehow kind of gripping! ( )

This is an always interesting description of the people and events of the financial crisis from the sale of Bear Stearns in 2008 through the passage of TARP at year end. This is not a book about the causes of the panic, nor was it meant to be.

A few things strike me.

Until TARP, the government is always reacting, trying to catch up to events. The crisis accelerates and expands and yet the response is sequential, to each event, at it happens. Because of that the reaction is ad hoc. Sell Bear Stearns to JP Morgan. Let Lehman fail. Take over Fannie and Freddie, but try to arrange mergers of (choose your partners) JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Wachovia, Merrill, BofA.

Because the reactions are ad hoc, the advice is often confusing and contradictory and not planned. Geithner (he does this often) tells an investment bank to “talk” to a commercial bank, meaning sell to them, but he hasn’t told the commercial bank it is the buyer. Barclays is negotiating to buy Lehman and only finds out at the end of the process the UK regulators won’t approve it.

The housing market peaked in 2006. There was a widespread recognition the housing market was in decline. And yet, Bear, Lehman, Merrill, the Feds are not adjusting to that change. The investment banks do not adjust their balance sheets to reflect the asset impairment and are either clueless of delusional about the tenuous of their liabilities. And these are the smart guys. Everyone is brilliant in a bull market. And the Feds are not looking with greater interest at the market. These are the experts we are relying on to make sure the market doesn’t get out of control?

CEO’s, CFO’s, millionaires, entrepreneurs and regulators, can be highly educated, highly experienced, highly successful and completely driven by emotion at the worst time. Exhibit A is Dick Fuld who refuses to recognize the peril he and Lehman are in until the very last minute. He is just like many of the CEOs I deal with who can’t bring themselves to raise many when they can, instead of when they need it and terms are much more onerous.

Paulson is the hero of the tale. Geithner comes across as out of his depths. Bernanke should be, but isn’t, a main player and Sheila Bair is portrayed as incompetent (probably unfair).

Near the end many events are happening simultaneously and the chapters become more disjointed as Sorkin moves from one event to another. It is a petty criticism of the book. This is an excellent account of the personalities and events of 2008.

2019-10-18 ( )

Too big to fail - and apparently the egos of the major players are as well. This group of men - all in-bred for having worked or having dealt with each other - are quite comfortable asking each other for millions of dollars. Some come up "smelling" better than others. Their clever "instruments" helped them build a system based on promises. One of the best quotes in the book comes from a retired financier who announces that they weren't innovative for the public - the only innovation in 10 years that helped the public was the ATM. The story definitely reads as a journalistic "edge of your seat" thriller, written in excruciating detail. I'm glad to have a better understanding of the events and personalities of the debacle. ( )

Fascinating tale of the Wall Street financial crisis, compiled from interviews and documents, by reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. ( )

Fascinating tale of the Wall Street financial crisis, compiled from interviews and documents, by reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. ( )

Entertaining and educational. I have a much better understanding of what it was that caused the financial system meltdown and why banks were using these financial instruments. The book was a bit character heavy, I really needed an organizational chart in front me while reading - so many CEOs and their financial deputies mentioned throughout the book. ( )

I feel proud for getting to the end of this, because there were times I didn’t think I was going to make it. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. The author explains everything clearly and no one can say this is a story without narrative drive.

In the end, though, I’m not sure whether Sorkin isn’t trying to do too much - a pacy blockbuster and an academically respectable analysis rolled into one - but he manages the balancing act as well as anyone could. His major problem is the incredibly long cast-list, both individuals and institutions. In fairness, there’s a dramatis personae at the beginning, but it’s organised by institution rather than individual, so that, for example, if you forget who Mark Feldman is - a name I chose at random for the purposes of this review - you can’t just look under ‘F’: you have to go through each organisation until you get to ‘JP Morgan Chase’ - and there he is, sixth name down. (And, yes, there is an index, but it’s only reasonably helpful in this regard: ‘Feldman, Mark, AIG final capital search, 340, 379, 384). None of this is helped by the fact that none of the big players on Wall Street are well-known names. The consequence was that it was only by about page 400 that I felt I was getting to really known them all.

The two biggest characters in Too Big To Fail are Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, and Hank Paulson, Secretary of the US Treasury. Sorkin has a lot of sympathy for Fuld (p539), while Paulson is undoubtedly the closest the book has to a hero. Sorkin’s admiration for Paulson is far from unqualified. “It cannot be denied,” he writes, “that federal officials - including Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner - contributed to the market turmoil through a series of inconsistent decisions. They offered a safety net to Bear Stearns and backstopped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but allowed Lehman to fall into [bankruptcy], only to rescue AIG soon after. What was the pattern? What were the rules? There didn’t appear to be any, and when investors grew confused … they not surprisingly began to panic” (p539).

Reading this book as a British citizen, I must admit to feeling it told me quite a lot about the US attitude to the UK. At one point, the British are all but given the blame for the fall of Lehman, after HM government refuses, late on, to back the Barclay’s bid for it. “‘He’s (ie, Alistair Darling) not going to do it,’ Paulson told Geithner in amazement. ‘He said he didn’t want to “import our cancer”’” (p350). One wonders how the Bush administration would have reacted, being asked to guarantee a similar project only in reverse?

Oh, and hold on. Rather later in the book, the British help save the day: Goldman Sachs is on its way under, and Mr Darling introduces a partial ban on short-selling in the UK. “But just then, at 1pm, the market - and Goldman’s stock - suddenly turned around, with Goldman rising to $87 a share, then $89. Traders raced through their screens trying to determine what had been responsible for the lift, and discovered that the Financial Services Authority in the UK had announced a thirty-day ban on short selling twenty-nine financial stocks, including Goldman Sachs. It was exactly what Blankfein and Mack had tried to persuade the SEC’s Christopher Cox to do” (p441). Indeed, just about all the main troubled giants on Wall Street have called for some sort of ban on short-selling throughout the book, some of them vociferously, but the US government won’t hear of it. Anyway, Goldman Sachs is retrieved at the eleventh hour by the decisive action of the UK government. How do its employees react? Three cheers for Great Britain? A rousing chorus of God Save the Queen? No, “a young trader found a copy of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ on the internet and broadcast it over the speakers to commemorate the moment. About three dozen traders stood up from their desks, placed their hands over their hearts, and sang aloud, accompanied by high fives and cheers” (p442).

Sheesh, that’s gratitude. But then, as Matt Taibbi apparently wrote in Rolling Stone, Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” (p537). Typical squid gratitude perhaps.

This is a very good account of the Wall Street Crash of 2008. To intending readers, I’d advise putting aside one large chunk of time to read it, rather than lots of little chunks: that way you’re more likely to maintain a handle on the characters and events. And, at 530 pages of small font, you’ve got to be very, very interested in this particular historical event. I wasn’t perhaps enough - but I still managed to finish it anyway. I’m glad I did. ( )

What the financial crisis in the US essentially came down to was the bankers had the government balls in a nice tight wrench and if those balls got gangrene and dropped off, leaving the whole of the Western world without a banking system and the ensuing anarchy, they couldn't care less because they were filthy rich anyway and would, personally, all of them be more than just all right. (Skip to the last-but-two paragraph if you don't want the lead-up to how).

How it works, in a simplified way (the only way I can grasp it, financial pea-brain as I am and leaves out the part insurance companies played) is that the banks use their money, our money, our deposits, to make money by lending it out as mortgages and business loans. They make money on the interest people have to pay for those loans. If the standards for getting a loan are pretty lax (as they were at the time) then a lot of people won't be able to repay their loans and the bank doesn't have the money, isn't earning interest but has a dud house that won't sell for a profitable amount or a bankrupt business. So the bank isn't making any money but in an effort to do so, it relaxes restrictions on getting a loan even more so even more people borrow money and fail to repay it in this depressed economy... etc. etc. etc.

There is another arm to this banking scam business, that is investment, and here's where the big bucks come in. Investment bankers are always looking for good businesses where they can buy shares at a much lower price than they think they will rise to in the future, then they can sell them and realise a profit. Of course, there is always the risk they made a wrong judgement call and the shares fall in price and as they are on their way down they have to decide whether to stick with them and hold on to them and hope they will go up (some time) or get out with a reduced amount. Either way the bank is holding on to some pretty worthless stuff, like the houses that got foreclosed and won't sell for the value of the loan and the bankrupt businesses, or they've taken a loss on the shares either completely or close enough.

So there you have it, whatever the banks did in a depressed economy they were losing money.

If everyone were to go to their bank to withdraw all their money they couldn't as the banks have lost some of the money on those unwise deals, and have more locked up in loans and investments that might pay up or might also go belly-up. So some of the bigger investors seeing that Lehmans among other banks looked like they were full of bad debts and old houses and not much cash wanted their money out. On Wall Street, people took notice of big investors pulling their money out, and more people did, and started to look at the other banks (most of whom were in exactly the same position). So these big investors were pulling their money out from everywhere and looking to the Far East and points South, North, East and West where the bankers had been more regulated by government and not allowed to carry on risking people's money to the degree there was no longer enough to pay people their money back.

So the banks couldn't pay back the depositors their money, and like a pack of cards one after the other began to collapse. The next thing, the final thing really, was the fear that you and me and everyone else on your street would suddenly wake up and realise what was happening with the big investors was happening to you too and be in the queue at their bank at 9 a.m. to withdraw their money. And the bank wouldn't have it. Can you imagine the scene? Smashed ATMs and rioting. Businesses would not pay their overnight deposits in the next night, everyone would demand to be paid in cash, shops would not accept credit cards, debit cards wouldn't work. There would be anarchy in the streets. And the government would fall.

The US holds the principles of capitalism far too dear and always sees Communism when nationalisation and regulation of industries is debated, even when, as with the bankers it was obviously needed. So before a rescue package could be put together, they had to overcome the Fear of the Bogeyman. Once they did that, they could put together a financial package loaning the banks at very favourable terms, enough billions that everyone who wanted their money could get it and their would be enough left over to invest and hopefully restore the banks to their usual obscenely greedy profit-making. What really swayed them was the fact that the government would fall and they, Bush's Republicans, would 100% definitely be out of a job.

So now is the time for regulating the banks and how they spend these vast sums that are being loaned to them. But guess what? The bankers won't accept any meaningful regulation at all. Its fine by them if the banks collapse, they've all been drawing huge salaries and bonuses often in the millions. And knowing the collapse was coming you can be sure their money was holed up somewhere safe. So the government had a three way choice. One, let the banks collapse and the government along with it producing a Depression so major that it would reverberate around the world and make the depression of the 30s look like some minor thing that happened way back when. Two, call the bankers' bluff and bail out the banks and regulate their investments so that our homes, our small businesses and our money was safe by stopping the bankers risky behaviour (this would have benefited the average person, you and me). Three, give in to the bankers, let them invest as they please make huge profits (if they could) and then awarding themselves multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses and throwing us, average Joes, to the pits.

The investment bankers said if you put any restrictions on us, we will all leave, we will retire, we will go to other countries' banks, we will do as we please, but we will not work in any bank that restricts how we do our business, so we got you over a barrel, either you do it our way or no way. Hahaha

Yep. By the balls. And the average Joe ....

So the situation now is as it was, seven financial institutions control the banking system of the US and should they fail, well, read the book!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

(Just a note, the more a country relies on financial products the more it is susceptible to a depression. If the country relies on manufacturing items people want - China, Germany, South Korea etc - then its in a much stronger situation. Sure it could be hard to raise money to buy raw materials and machinery if the banks go, but what they have sold and have to sell gives them cash coming in.

Another note, you paid the bankers salaries and bonuses, you paid for their bail out when they did it wrong and you are paying through interest for their salaries and bonuses again. What interest does the bank give you on your deposit? Essentially, the public is triple screwed.).

What are the alternatives to the banking system? Buy gold, ingots not jewellery, you don't want to pay for the design, and find somewhere safe to put it, ie. not a bank. Or... money under the mattress!
( )

If anything else, this is an entertaining book. Big tough bankers swear and dick around like petty real-estate salesmen from a David Mamet play.

It's also a good history of part of the 2007-2009 recession, specifically the collapse and restructuring of the investment banking system. Lehman Brothers is gone, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, AIG got money from the Fed, and the survivors rest put an emergency fund together, similar to the private response to the crashes of 1907 and 1929. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley said 'enough' to the investment banking business, and became bank holding companies.

This book focuses on the executive personalities and decisions which led to this deal. It does a good job of this, with a Woodward/Bernstein style look at how deals were made.

The problem of this book is the lack of general context - how the crisis even happened, with barely any mention of the real estate bubble and only a few pages devoted to derivatives. Sorkin here is a fine reporter, now it's time to analyze and see who will be in the right or wrong from this. ( )

Read like a horror book. Amazing. $100 million a year in pay and benefits in some cases, and the big boys acted like a bunch of children. I support capitalism, but this is evidence that capitalism needs adult supervision. ( )

Believe it or not, quite a zippy read (600-plus pages, including index, character cast and afterword). But for all that, does it adequately explain how it went so wrong? Nope. As with Michael Lewis's The Big Short, I'm still left wondering: stupid or evil?

The problem is that the period most intensely covered here is so brief. It starts shortly before the Lehman collapse in September 2008 and then dives into all the frantic behind-the-scenes manoeuvring of the bank execs, AIG, Treasury secy Paulson and the Federal Reserve in the following few weeks. All fine and I especially liked learning about the extent of the govt's powers to regulate and intervene. Sorkin researched and interviewed like a demon to get all this detail.

BUT this choice means that the banks have already discovered their desperate situation. I can pinpoint a few people, now ousted in this timeline, that deserve blame and possibly prosecution: Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch and Martin Lynch of AIG. But I'd like to scroll back in time and see how they started accumulating this crap and how AIG decided to offer insurance for them. Goldman Sachs, Paulson's old firm, didn't get much involved in these mortgage-backed securities. Neither did Wells Fargo. Why? Who did the analysis?

There is an afterword and an epilogue in my 2010 edition but it's nowhere near enough to illuminate any reader's most burning questions: Was there a better way to do bailouts? Sure, these surviving banks have repaid their loans, but was it enough? Who should be in prison right now? Surely there was a way that Congress could have cancelled the compensation contracts? What's the state of bank regulation right now?

Anyone looking for a revolving door, govt-Wall Street conspiracy will be disappointed. I don't see any evidence that the banks entered such a dangerous business counting on a govt rescue or Congressional rescue. Paulson, who had to be a source, comes off quite well, trying to do what's right and as pissed off as any citizen when confronted with banker boneheaded-ness. He certainly didn't want a bailout--neither did Republicans or Democrats in Congress. And his every movement and phone call is documented.

The book could have done a better job of explaining the urgency of action. Sorkin should have spelled out in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman collapse what was happening around the world, how all these banks have interlocking obligations. It was like dominos collapsing. You're a company with a stellar credit rating expecting your goods to be picked up in Abu Dhabi and the bank won't honor your letter of credit. And the bank can't be blamed really. A half a dozen huge shipping firms collapsed at the end of 2008.

FWIW, Too Big to Fail does a very poor job of defining sub-prime mortgage, credit default swap and collaterized debt obligations. It doesn't try until hundreds of pages in. For that, dip into Michael Lewis. You don't have to read his entire book but at least that is explained very well.

As for the issue or prosecution. The New Yorker's George Packer provides a partial answer in a Q and A accompanying his June 2011 story on an unrelated insider trading case that was prosecuted. Yes, there are quite a few prosecutions against Countrywide and other mortgage companies. More civil suits. Also some cases being brought by the FDIC and SEC. But a major impediment seems to have been the way investigations were doled out to federal district courts in parts of the country other than New York's--New York having the best expertise to investigate such kinds of crimes. But he also quotes the current New York prosecutor on the need to have hard evidence--like wiretaps and e-mails. Hard to believe there isn't or wasn't a bunch of the latter as the investment banks bought and sold CDOs. ( )

I read this book for book club but it was always on my never-ending list of books to read. The financial crisis is like a genetically compromised octopus with 100 tentacles and growing. People who understand the banking and financial industry will sail through this book. The rest of us (me!) -- though not lacking in intelligence, education, and experience -- will have a difficult time keeping track of the characters and events and coming away with a finely-attuned sense of how everything connects (it all does) and what lessons may have been learned (none).

The book blessedly contains a cast of characters, both home-grown and international, at the front of the book, but there were so many incestuous business relationships and intermarriage among banks and CEOs, that it may be of little use. Most readers will merely recognize names from their ubiquitous appearances in the daily news. The book also contains a very detailed bibliography and index.

Sorkin's book details the events and background during a short period of time encompassing the government's bail-out of all the investments houses except for Lehman Brothers. Yes, the book does read like a best-selling thriller, even without understanding the details. It's hard to put it down or put it out of one's mind but reading it even at the broad level at which I did will occupy a very large chunk of one's days/weeks. It's worth the effort if only to realize every diabolical and sleazy thought you've ever had about Wall Street and the evil that lurks there is more true than you could ever imagine, even if you possess an Ivy League MBA. You may even, as I did, find yourself rooting for the financial collapse of the entire banking system just so it can start all over from scratch with unforgiving enforcement of meaningful rules and regulations, sanity, and real concern for the people whose money is being played with -- notwithstanding the ensuing international crisis unlike one we've ever before witnessed. Without that, taxpayers (you and me) will be rescuing the banks and the players in perpetuity and they will continue to get rich and stay rich while they stealing from us and paying themselves obscene salaries out of money that never existed. If you read this book and then grab your backpack for an OWS protest, good for you! We need more protesters. ( )

Heavily detailed. Too many characters not to have a better means of identification. Best part is Epilogue. ( )

Andrew Ross Sorkin manages to document the near-collapse of the US economy in 2008 in this near brilliant, true-life financial thriller. Working from thousands of sources, he manages to craft a story so compelling it literally becomes a page-turner.

Starting with brief biographical summaries of each of the major players as they are introduced to the story helps to humanize what could be an overwhelming, data-driven work. The players who showed glimpses of humanity are contrasted with those whose own greed and lust for material wealth prevented them from realizing the risks involved.

By the time the fateful weeks in September 2008 roll around, even though we know the outcome, the reader is hooked. The egos in the conference rooms should have precluded any possible resolution from being reached, but the efforts of the Treasury and Fed, particularly in the guises of Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, to practically force the senior executives of the financial firms to work together to save the economy are depicted as near Herculean feats of strength.

No one goes untarnished in this account, not the regulators who should have been watching, not the government agencies who should have been more aware and definitely not the executives themselves who should have known better than to risk not just their own companies but the entire US and global economies all in a mindless pursuit of short-term profits.

The only disappointment for me was not enough time spent on the roots of the crisis, the deregulation, the near giveaways of mortgages with no proof of payment, the culture that rewards executives for obscene short-term profits with no regard for the long-term impacts. Additionally, while some potential preventive measures are discussed, I would have appreciated more detail on how these repeated bubble-burst cycles could be diminished.

Overall, for anyone interested in a thrilling account of some of the most trying days in the US economy's history, you can't do better than this book. ( )

Andrew Ross Sorkin, business reporter for the New York Times, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the financial meltdown of 2008 in "Too Big to Fail." Published in 2009, the book offers a myriad of minute by minute details, particularly over the frantic weekend during which Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed chair Ben Bernanke, and then-president of the New York Fed Tim Geithner coordinated government intervention to purchase toxic assets.

Relying on several unnamed sources, Sorkin carefully reconstructs the chaotic time. In particular, he details the deliberate and increasingly dictatorial government intervention into the problems, which often took the form of brief phone calls encouraging the involved banks, brokerages, and insurance companies to reach out to one another either by extending lines of credit or attempting to merge.

Without being pedantic, Sorkin tries to explain the causes and potential consequences of the financial crisis in plain English, if a bit unsuccessfully. What is clear, though, is that the entire system lacks sufficient accountability, even within itself, as large companies hedge their bets ever more aggressively, following the examples of their competitors with little attention, or complete understanding, of the deals they pursued. To cite the most obvious example, the credit default swap, in which various banks repackaged parts of loans in a way that appeared to disseminate risk, it quickly becomes obvious that the safeguard is an illusion and the CDS is entirely risk-based.

Perhaps more troubling now than at the time is the impromptu, seat-of-the-pants decision-making that reigned during the most hectic parts of the 2008 crisis, particularly in September. Sleep-deprived executives and government officials worked long hours – virtually around-the-clock – to forestall a systemwide panic in which there would be a collective "run on the bank." It seems unlikely that the decisions reached in such trying circumstances will forestall future problems, a point Sorkin highlights in the afterword written for the paperback edition.

If there is a weakness to Sorkin's book, it is likely the nonjudgmental approach he takes when describing all of the key players. This makes it difficult to judge, or even understand, whether some of the key executives and officials made bad management decisions or simply were in completely over their heads.

This, however, is a minor quibble. Sorkin offers a fast-paced, multilayered account, which would seem almost cinematic at points, except for the huge cast of characters (so large in fact, that Sorkin lists all of the key players on eight pages at the start of the book). Balancing a complex timeline with the huge number of players, the book is invariably interesting and exciting, even difficult to put down. ( )