The Skimmer

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

Viking; 624 pages

Behind each twist and turn of last year's financial crisis was a small club of (mostly) men--many of them friends, plenty more rivals--who determined, often by the seat of their pants, how events would unfold. In Too Big to Fail, Sorkin, a New York Times reporter, takes us inside the cozy world of Wall Street chieftains and their Washington alter egos. Why did the U.S. Treasury Department ask Congress for $700 billion in bank-bailout funds? Because $500 billion felt too small and $1 trillion politically impossible; one staffer, charged with justifying the figure, laughed "at the absurdity of it all." Sorkin's meeting-by-meeting account reveals just how close we came to any number of alternate realities: Morgan Stanley going bankrupt, AIG refusing government money, Goldman Sachs buying Wachovia. The detail is comprehensive and chilling, but the big picture is incomplete. The story of how the financial system arrived at such a brink and of the social and political fallout will have to be told by other books.

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