Too Big to Fail

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, a New York Times financial journalist, is a long, but fascinating story about the collapse of the U.S. and global financial markets in 2008. The book was written based on interviews the author conducted with the major players in the financial crisis. These interviews are documented through tapes, notes, presentations, calendars, call logs, and more. The level of detail is nothing short of amazing, and makes the story long. The author keeps it interesting.
Too Big to Fail

Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial journalist for the New York Times, has attempted, in Too Big to Fail, to provide a moment-by-moment account of the worst calamity to ever affect the U.S. financial markets since the Great Depression. It became a tsunami that triggered financial collapse in the world markets as well.

Sorkin builds a story of how the financial collapse of Wall Street in the fall of 2008 actually started much earlier - in the spring of 2008. Wall Street and Washington were intricately tied together in the collapse and Sorkin details the level and depth of these ties. At the first of the book, he lists his cast of characters. They include the management of all the major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, along with AIG, Bank of America, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as overseas organizations from countries like China and Korea.

The cast of characters also includes a whole raft of attorneys, individuals from Great Britian, as well as from the U.S. Congress, the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the White House, and the FDIC. This is not an exhaustive list.

Because of the author's position at the New York Times, he had unprecedented access to this cast of characters and was able to write a book with all the detail supporting the drama of what led up to the collapse of Wall Street and our financial system in 2008. The major players on Wall Street knew that the dominoes were going to fall as early as the spring of 2008 as Lehman Brothers started to fail. Sorkin discusses the events leading from that time to the collapse.
Summary

Too Big to Fail is actually a thriller about a time in America's financial history when our entire economy could have crumbled and almost did. Greed, the hunger for power, the hunger for money, and the lack of financial regulation all led to the financial collapse. You will see inside the egos of the cast of characters including the politicians involved.

Some say that Sorkin writes with a "liberal bias" but I, as a reviewer, don't see that. He seems to write the facts based on an incredible level of documentation. I give the book 4 stars. The only reason I don't give it 5 stars is because I thought the editing was poorly done.

If you want to truly understand what happened when our financial system failed and the economy went into a deep recession because of it, read this book. At the end, you will be astonished and amazingly well-informed.