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, written by American journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a nonfiction work published in 2009. The subtitle accurately describes what the work accomplishes, and the book is the product of “more than five hundred hours of interviews with more than two hundred individuals who participated directly in the events surrounding the financial crisis” (vii). Sorkin, a financial columnist for the New York Times, aims to provide “the first detailed, moment-by-moment account of one of the most calamitous times in our history” (viii). He hopes to make these “bewildering financial events […] a little easier to understand” (viii).

The Prologue of the book sets the stage, noting that this is the story of the “real people […] who controlled the economy’s fate” in the critical months after March 17, 2008, when JP Morgan agreed to buy Bear Stearns and the US government eventually undertook the “largest public intervention in US history” (6). Chapter 1 introduces two of those key players: Richard S. Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Subsequent chapters focus on other players and key events in the financial crisis, such as congressional hearings, earnings calls, and failed negotiations.

In an Epilogue, Sorkin offers a bird’s-eye view of the crisis and ponders if history will reveal whether the major players in these events succeeded or failed. And in an Afterword, Sorkin updates the story as of July 2018, pointing out that new fears, such as cyberterrorism and governments themselves being overleveraged, have largely replaced concerns about whether financial institutions might be “too big to fail.” Sorkin speculates that we may be “overdue” (544) for another huge financial crisis.