Too Big To Fail

The 2008 economic crisis on Wall Street which has since triggered international financial has been the centre of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, as people attempt to understand exactly what went wrong. I learnt about the majority of what happened through reading articles in Vanity Fair, which really intrigued me and when I watched a Culture Show special on the Johnson Book Prize, Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail really intrigued me.

Ross Sorkin's book starts a little while after the government/JP Morgan deal in rescuing Bear Sterns. It soon moves on to examine perhaps the greatest victim of the financial crisis; Lehman Brothers. Following the failure of this company, Ross Sorkin then moves on to examine the Treasury and New York Fed attempts to solidify AIG, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

The book goes behind the business scenes into the offices of Richard Fuld (head of Lehman brothers), Hank Paulson (Treasury Secretary) and into the New York Federal Reserve, ruled over by Timothy Geithner. Ross Sorkin manages to paint full pictures of all the figures mentioned by delving into their back history's in order to give the reader a greater knowledge of the people as people. I found myself feeling almost (and I mean *almost*) sorry for Fuld, who had re-established Lehman Brothers and had seen it rise to mega-status again, and for John Mack, of Morgan Stanley, whose bank was ripped apart by rumours (and a lack of direct cash). He succeeds in making the reader feel literally in the room when the testosterone-and-no-sleep-fuelled decisions were made. Ross Sorkin also explains financial terms in a way that is not patronising, but enables someone like me who is not necessarily au fait with economic terms to understand what is going on.

The most interesting aspect of Too Big to Fail was the explorations of the strange decision making made by the Treasury and New York Fed; which saved Bear Sterns, let Lehman fail, then engineered mergers between banks (which came about in cryptic phone calls with people saying 'So-and-so will call you in a moment'), saved AIG, and then gave $10-25billion to every investment bank remaining on Wall Street, a figure that has since increased dramatically.

I'd recommend this book if you are interested in learning more about the banking crisis, without complicated language. Andrew Ross Sorkin's book reads like a potential film script, and is remarkably fast-paced, especially in the final phases of the book. For a book about a complicated subject, it is highly enjoyable.