Too Big To Fail

Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, 539 pages

Too Big To Fail is the definitive journalistic account of the financial crisis of 2008. as seen through the eyes of the bankers and brokers as they tried desperately to find a solution to the problems they themselves had created.  Their efforts range from the almost heroic - in one thirteen hour workday, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was involved in no fewer than sixty-nine phone calls and meetings - to the comic - an AIG vice president hustling through the streets of New York carrying a briefcase stuffed with $14 billion in bonds - to the entirely absurd - several dozen Goldman Sachs traders reacting to the news that the UK had imposed a moratorium on short-selling their company's stock by rising to their feet and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner".  Sorkin, who covered the meltdown for The New York Times, goes into truly impressive, almost overwhelming detail about the events of September 2008.

The book is badly organized at times - Sorkin first tells the story of John Thain's overhaul of the New York Stock Exchange, then his life story up until became CEO of NYSE, and then continues with his later leadership of Merrill Lynch.  This further confuses a narrative already burdened by hundreds of characters and dozens of companies and government agencies.  Sorkin also - whether through journalistic objectivity or simple myopia - seems blind to the absurdity of some of the situations he describes, like AIG's scramble to ensure that the brokers who lost 5 billion dollars of the company's money wouldn't leave for their competitors.  Perspective is easy to lose - Sorkin is so engaging in his description of the titanic struggle to save Wall Street that it is easy to forget that even the failures wound up wealthy far beyond most people's imagining.

Too Big To Fail is a tremendous accomplishment within the limits it sets for itself.  The story of what happened as the 2008 crisis climaxed is covered exhaustively.  How it happened, how it affected ordinary people, and what it ultimately cost is outside its scope - for that, we must turn to books like Madrick's Age of Greed, Stockman's The Great Deformation, or Barofsky's Bailout.  The occasional mention of how the unfolding of the crisis might affect ordinary Americans only serves to underscore how little such concerns matter on the highest levels of our political and economic systems.