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Andrew Ross Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news at The New York Times. He is also The New York Times chief mergers and acquisitions reporter and a columnist and the editor of DealBook an online daily financial report. Sorkin is a graduate of Cornell University. Too Big to vis mere Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System - and Themselves is Sorkin's first book. Sorkin has appeared on NBC's "Today" show and on "Charlie Rose" on PBS, and is a frequent guest host of CNBC's "Squawk Box." He's won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2004, a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award in 2005 and in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. He was also named to the Directorship 100, a list of the most influential people on the nation's board of directors. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Sorkin and his wife live in Manhattan. (Bowker Author Biography) vis mindre
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This is the story of how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Federal Reserve tried but failed to head off the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 as told in the voices of the principal players. Just after I read this book I began reading Lords of Finance, a similar tale about the failure of the national bankers in the 1920's to head of the crash of '29. Both stories have a similar ring: the adults come in to restore order after the children get out of hand, but the "adults" in both cases underestimate the power of events and overestimate their authority. In 2008 the institutions underestimated the amount of so-called risk in the system because they could not control the financial commitments the players had made, to the tune of trillions of dollars. In the 20's, bank regulators could not control the volume of credit flowing into the US stock market from foreign sources. What does this mean? And is there any similarity to the current threat of sovereign default in the European system? If money is not the promise of something being there when a debt is called, what is the nature of money, paper or otherwise? Here we have the dilemma of modern finance: when people and governments promise wealth or social security nets it is really not the promise of something that is real, but something that is wished for, not so unlike a gambling casino. We try to set up toll booths to regulate the promise-making machines, bank regulators, government auditors, credit-rating agencies, and the like, but the institutions cannot protect us against our fantasies getting ahead of reality. That we overcommit ourselves and our institutions is not so bad, after all, because optimism is a constituent of human nature it seems. Greed likewise is hard-wired into us. It greases the wheels of commerce. I'd hate to think of a world where we were not optimists. My business would certainly fail, so would many others. I'm not seeing any grand solutions in these books, but I sure am getting a dose of reality.… (mere)
 
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MylesKesten | 47 andre anmeldelser | Jan 23, 2024 |
I always used to say that life was too short for bad movies or cheap beer, but with books I had an ironclad and perhaps foolish rule: you make a commitment to read it all the way to the end. Not so with Too Big to Fail; for once (okay, twice), I broke that promise.

I've been working in financial services for over two years now, and was then employed for a company that went down spectacularly in flames during the crash. It was important for me to read something that tried to make sense of the Wall Street chaos.

This isn't that book. There's only the most cursory discussion of credit-default swaps, for instance -- for explanations, NPR's Planet Money, or The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, does a far better job -- and for all of Sorkin's attention to detail throughout, one doesn't get a good sense of how everything is connected.

The book is also terribly formulaic. By the third chapter or so the schema is set: introduce yet another person, describe their backgrounds (disappointingly uniform, I must say), add some detail about their culinary habits or the car they drive or The Moment They Received the Fateful Phone call, then move on to the next COO (either the one about to be replaced, or the replacement). With a cast of characters as long as a business account's legal disclosure, it isn't immediately clear why each one is relevant other than the fact that they spoke to Sorkin for the record.

Sorkin has a good handle on what creates tension within a scene, but there's no disguising the fact that most of the action takes place in boardrooms and offices. (If this were a film, we'd at least get an unconvincing montage of people staring at computer screens to gussy up the action, but there's no opportunity for that here.)

What kept me doggedly reading the next few chapters after that wasn't some narrative hook, ultimately, but the nagging, guilty, post-crash feeling of frugality that I spent good money on this, and that I could at least squeeze a few more minutes of entertainment out of it. But "life is short" won the day.
… (mere)
 
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thewilyf | 47 andre anmeldelser | Dec 25, 2023 |
There are few people alive today that experienced the onset of the Great Depression nor seeing reactions in real time or the in-depth analysis of financiers, pundits, government officials, and politicians however that isn’t the case for the beginning of the Great Recession. 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 that provides an overview of the 2007-8 financial crisis from the aftermath of the sale of Bear Stearns to the creation of TARP.

The main figures throughout the book are Treasury Secretary Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson and his staff, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Tim Geithner though throughout the first half of the book the major secondary figure was Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. While Sorkin covers all the threads of the slowly deteriorating of the economic environment, it’s Fuld and Lehman Brothers that is focus due to their bankruptcy leading to one of---if the most---tumultuous weeks on Wall Street, in Washington, and around the world in financial history. Let’s be clear, there are no heroes presented just people finding their worldviews getting a serious reality check as they stare into the abyss. Through Fuld is in no way a sympathetic individual, Sorkin’s writing does make him a tragic figure whose efforts to save his company were at times undermined by his own brash bravado to the point that in the end his subordinates cut him out of the increasingly futile efforts to save the company. Though originally written and published a little over a year after the dark days of September and October 2008, there is some fuzziness on the state of the world then when viewed 15 years later and the afterworld written for this 10th anniversary edition only shows a little of the long-term effects and aftershocks that are affecting the world today.

Too Big to Fail chronicles the inside story of how the financial system imploded even as Wall Street and Washington struggled to save it. Andrew Ross Sorkin portrays the situation in understandable terms and presents the participants as people struggling against a situation that undermines their preconceived notions without prejudice or favor.
… (mere)
 
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mattries37315 | 47 andre anmeldelser | Mar 26, 2023 |
Pretty gripping, almost thriller-ish. Made me appreciate the hard work of the Feds though I don't feel much better about the bankers who got us into the mess and still haven't paid a price for it.
 
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squealermusic | 47 andre anmeldelser | Mar 16, 2023 |

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