Book Review: Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

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
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

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