Book review: Blow-by-blow of crisis reads like a thriller
October 30, 2009
By James Pressley
Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is almost too big to read: 600 packed pages recounting, blow by BlackBerried blow, how Wall Street and Washington struggled to save the financial system (and their own skins).
I say "almost" because Sorkin has pulled off a rare feat. He has turned more than 500 hours of interviews and documentary evidence ranging from e-mails to call logs into an engrossing fly-on-the-wall account of one of the most tumultuous years in US history.
"In the end," he writes, "this drama is a human one, a tale about the fallibility of people who thought they themselves were too big to fail."
Sorkin, who works for the New York Times, begins where other crisis books end, with the shotgun marriage of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase. As chapter one opens, we see Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers Holdings shuffling out the front door of his mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and into the back seat of a chauffeured black Mercedes. It's 5am on March 17 2008, and there's talk of a run on the bank.
From there, Sorkin traces the full arc of the crisis as it unfolded in executive suites, corporate jets and the government suburbans that year. He shows how US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner at the New York Fed brokered ad hoc deals in an attempt to halt the conflagration as it engulfed one institution after another: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, American International Group.
The story closes on the chilling day last October when Paulson seated the leaders of nine banks around a 7m-long mahogany table and effectively ordered them to take government cash injections in exchange for preferred shares.
What sets this account apart is its smooth synthesis of telling details, conversations and multiple story lines into a seamless narrative written in lean, unembroidered sentences. It reads like a thriller without the hype. However, the drawback is that we have to take Sorkin's word for much of what he reports. There's little in the way of attribution, and most of the people he interviewed collaborated only on condition that they wouldn't be identified, he says. - Bloomberg
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