Too Big To Fail: Insider the financial crisis
Andrew Ross Sorkin is the New York Times’ chief M&A reporter and business columnist. Sorkin is also the editor of DealBook, the NYT’s online daily financial report he started in 2001. In addition, Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news, helping guide and shape the paper’s coverage. Sorkin also frequently appears on NBC’s “Today” show, on “Charlie Rose” on PBS, and is a frequent guest on the business channel, CNBC.
Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves is Sorkin’s first book.
The book was recently released, and frankly, I haven’t finished reading it just yet, but what I have read is gripping! If you’ve ever wanted to be a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ in the clubby, heavily wood-paneled board rooms or the glass-encased corner offices of chief executives when the deal is being negotiated, this is it.
The book is interesting, detailed and crammed with an ‘insider’s’ perspective as the drama that precipitated the ‘Great Recession’ unfolded. Sorkin provides a lot of inside information about what was going on inside the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, the big Wall Street firms and in the Bush White House as the dominoes started falling. You’ll enjoy learning why the original TARP document was only eleven pages long; what made John Mack at Mogan Stanley angry, what Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld was doing to try to keep the ship from sinking and what was going on in mind of Hank Paulson and his secret meeting with the Board of Goldman prior to the crash. This is truly a ‘must read’!
In addition, Sorkin was a guest lecturer at FPA earlier this month, and there are really compelling snippets of information that add insight and understanding to unfolding of the actual financial crisis, the major players, and whether or not Wall Street and government regulators have learned anything as a result. You can see the video clip of his comments at FPA below.
