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    Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
    Unavailable
    Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
    Unavailable
    Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
    Ebook1,002 pages14 hours

    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

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Brand New for 2018: an updated edition featuring a new afterword to mark the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis
     
    The brilliantly reported New York Times bestseller that goes behind the scenes of the financial crisis on Wall Street and in Washington to give the definitive account of the crisis, the basis for the HBO film
     
    “Too Big To Fail is too good to put down. . . . It is the story of the actors in the most extraordinary financial spectacle in 80 years, and it is told brilliantly.” —The Economist
     
    In one of the most gripping financial narratives in decades, Andrew Ross Sorkin—a New York Times columnist and one of the country's most respected financial reporters—delivers the first definitive blow-by-blow account of the epochal economic crisis that brought the world to the brink. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, he re-creates all the drama and turmoil of these turbulent days, revealing never-before-disclosed details and recounting how, motivated as often by ego and greed as by fear and self-preservation, the most powerful men and women in finance and politics decided the fate of the world's economy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9781101443248
    Unavailable
    Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
    Author

    Andrew Ross Sorkin

    Andrew Ross Sorkin is the award-winning chief mergers and acquisitions reporter for The New York Times, a columnist, and assistant editor of business and finance news. He is also the editor and founder of DealBook, an online daily financial report. He has won a Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in business journalism, and a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.

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    Reviews for Too Big to Fail

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      It is like reading longest article in the New York times.about finance and watching CNBC at same time Mr.Sorkin gave probably most detail and at same time extraordinary look at Great Depression II this will be hard to beat both by detail and by amount of drama it is definitely worth all the time and all words and obviously all Book of the Year awards Bravo.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating tale of the Wall Street financial crisis, compiled from interviews and documents, by reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.
    • 5/5
      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
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      “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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Huge, well-documented, clearly written, a blow by blow account of the 2008 panic.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Heavily detailed. Too many characters not to have a better means of identification. Best part is Epilogue.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Offered good insight to some of the key events leading to the biggest financial meltdown of my life.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully written and breathlessly told, but after a while the formula (particularly the trick of inserting random incidental detail to make the reader feel THEY WERE REALLY THERE) starts to grate.
    • 5/5
      Sorkin was privy to a many of the conversations (related by participants) during this trying time. In spite of what many may think, the decisions were made in what was considered to be the best interests of the country (and the rest of the world) as understood by the participants. But the decisions were made under extremely trying conditions. The law of unintended consequences ruled, particularly after the collapse of Lehman. Sorkin relates these meetings, the humanity of the participants, and calculated guesses and decisions that saved the country from another Great Depression, but not from a great recession. It is a great read.
    • 3/5
      Fascinating book and a fairly breezy read. Too bad the blow-by-blow narration felt a bit fake--how could the author know what all these people said all those times?--and also made me dislike of most of the people in the book. I couldn't finish it.
    • 4/5
      Interesting read about the frenzy around the 2008 financial collapse. It was interesting reading about the people who run the industry I work in....an to understand how close we came to total collapse.
    • 3/5
      The destruction of the global financial markets and their flawed operational model has devastated millions of lives across the world, fired off a massive recession and ensured long slow recovery, perhaps over decades. You would never know it from reading this book. Sorkin paints an intimate portrait of the 12 or 18 months of shenanigans inside Wall Street, roughly centered on 2008.This book is a long narrative telling who did or said what to who. Sorkin offers little analysis or comment, just giving us the events as he has reconstructed them from innumerable interviews and documents. Even through the sometimes incomprehensible technicalities of the financial world the pressure, tension, excitement and fear are there to be felt.My problem is with the participants. There is hardly a mention of the vast impact on ordinary people of the decisons they made. Sometiimes they speak of the impact on their staf and shareholders. The most commonly expressed concern in the book is that ‘I will not get to be the CEO of this or that company’. The enormous waste of money to pamper the egos of these men (and, yes, it is all men. The only women present are quickly sidelined while he men spray testosterone from their solid gold cufflinks.) is truly shocking.Arrogant, venal, weak, self-obsessed these people truly believed they were the masters of the universe.This is an excellent introduction to the subject, offering a single narrative thread that tells us what happened. We need to look elswhere for why.Meanwhile, I have to feel sorry for these men who nver reached the pinnacles of their careers and who have to scrape by on a few tens of millions each year,
    • 4/5
      Good account of the day-by-day improvisations of Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner as they tried to prevent a melt-down in the global financial markets. The reader will come away with admiration for Paulson and grudging respest for Geithner, both of whom performed admirably in the crisis. The book does not attempt to judge the correctness of all their decisions, but clearly their decisiveness itself helped to avert a much larger disaster.
    • 4/5
      My only problem was keeping track of who worked for whom. Should have photocopied the Cast of Characters and kept it handy. Not quite up to "Barbarians at the Gate" intrigue, but a great account of that bail-out mess.
    • 4/5
      I thought this was a good account of what went on during the financial crisis. It is a rather dramatic account of the events, though, so one has to wonder if or where the author might have taken some dramatic license. Regardless of that, I thought it was a rather fair account of events. Given the public outcry over the bailout, and both Wall Street and the government's role, would be easy to slant a story against them. However, I think Sorkin did a very good job to try to tell the story without doing so.
    • 3/5
      I had mixed expectations from Too Big to Fail. Considering we are still very much in the thrall of one of the worst financial crises of the past century, it is unfair to expect a single book to provide a complete perspective. Andrew Ross Sorkin does not attempt to explain how or why we got into the events of 2008. The book's objective is very clear - to chronicle what was happening in the financial markets during 2008. At this task, the book succeeds. It has an impressive cast, from Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to the CEO of Lehman Brothers, Dick Fuld.About three quarters of the book is about the Lehman collapse. The author seems so focuse on the investment bank that you get almost no visibility into what was happening at say Citibank or AIG, though AIG does get some attention. The book refuses to be technical with Sorkin sticking to a journalistic tone. That I think is this account's greatest shortcoming - if you hope to understand what specific problems were being faced by Lehman Brothers before its failure, the reasons it found itself under attack by short sellers, you won't find the explanation here.Ultimately, this book is a good record of what happened but I think my reading list needs a lot more books to understand the why. I'd give the book a half hearted recommendation
    • 5/5
      Informative and entertaining. Fascinating to see how high government officials, Fed officials and Financial CEOs handled the economic crisis.Well wriiten and sourced.
    • 5/5
      Amazonian reactions to this book seem to fall into two buckets - on one view it's the definitive account of the investment banking crisis of 2008; on the other it is a slapdash, hastily thrown together, and un-penetrating story that lets itself be distracted by the Herculean egos (are there any other kinds on Wall Street?) and Olympian hubris and therefore fails to get anywhere near the nub of the issue: just how could this car crash ever have happened? There's an element of truth in both views, though I think the complaints of superficiality are - well - a little superficial. Firstly, be under no illusion that this is a quickly bashed-out pot-boiler; to the contrary, it's a book of monstrous scope. It covers an extraordinary series of dislocations in implausible, blow-by-blow, detail - more on this implausibility in a minute - Sorkin wisely includes a Dramatis Personae at the start, for the cast of events and characters and their various interactions here has the byzantine grandeur of a later James Ellroy novel (I just got through Blood's A Rover: the plotting in Too Big To Fail is comparable). Andrew Sorkin's simple achievement in commanding all these unconnected (if highly correlated) events and knitting them into a coherent, linear narrative is remarkable, particularly given the time in which Sorkin achieved this. It might have been fifteen months now, but it only seems like yesterday. As noted (and, elsewhere, complained about) Sorkin's interest is in the personalities behind the thrust and counterthrust rather than the macroeconomic backdrop. Far from being a drawback, that's precisely what is so perceptive about this book: the economic fundamentals "which lead to the crisis" aren't the whole story. Indeed they are *just* a story - and you'll find as many different analyses of precisely how this came about and whose fault it was as you could wish for, and while there is much consensus, there is a lot of disagreement too. But it doesn't matter. Once the balls were in motion, what mattered was who did what, when. Sorkin does assume some knowledge of the financial history of the last 15 years, and assumes you'll have a view by now the whole story, and whether it was Greenspan's free market fundamentalism, the disestablishment of the Glass Steagall Act, the rise of derivatives technology which permitted the securitisation of increasingly whacky assets, the negative feedback loop created by the originate-and-distribute model, the flaws and anomalies in CDO ratings methodologies or some diabolical confection of some or all of the above. (Actually, here's a great spin on the crisis: being as he was, the progenitor of modern whacky-asset securitisation when he securitised his back catalog, it's all David Bowie's fault!). You could, and I think Sorkin does, take the view that that's only the prelude to the story. And indeed, the crisis was in part caused by over-reliance on precisely the sort of fundamental analysis and economic theory (for example, the inappropriate probabilistic assumptions built into option pricing and VAR models that Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Nicholas Taleb have been banging on about for years; the laissez faire view held by Ben Bernanke's predecessor in the Federal Reserve) that some suggest is missing here. The rest of the story is that while, these economic theories and fundamental analyses are all well and good, it was the personal and political expedients - the Realpolitik - which actually made the difference. This is what Taleb would call the "intractable reality" of the world which bevils and taunts any neat macro-economic explanation. Black Scholes cannot factor in that Hank Paulson, an incontrovertible Master of the Universe on Wall Street, was a complete ingénue in Washington; that even if he'd wanted to Paulson *couldn't* bail out Lehman, however sensible it may have been, because the Republican majority wouldn't have stood for it; that the Goldman/Wachovia merger was politically impossible because of the multiple Goldman connections at the Fed, Treasury and both firms; that a Presidential election was looming with a grandstanding, flailing republican candidate; that no-one really liked Dick Fuld, Vikram Pandit or Sheila Bair. These things, at the limit (and God only knows, we *were* at the limit) make an enormous difference to the path of history, and macroeconomic hypothesising about why this was happening really misses the point. That said, there is certainly some (acknowledged, I think) implausibility in the level or detail to which the book descends: it is one thing to report the fact of a meeting or call between two protagonists who clearly would not have talked, on or off the record, to the author; it's quite another to construct (i.e., invent) their dialogue and reactions "verbatim". I don't believe for a moment that any of Paulson, Geithner, Bair, Jester, Steele, Bernanke, Dimon, Lewis, Thain, Diamond, Darling, Mack, Fuld, McDade or McGee spoke to Sorkin at all. So the book, explicitly, takes many liberties, and its recounting of conversations can only have been entirely made up by Sorkin. The somewhat hackneyed on monotonous voice through which Sorkin renders all of his characters would tend to validate this suspicion. For all that, the content of the conversations is plausible and the account of the actions, in the round, rings true. So a very good, entertaining, rollicking account. Well recommended.