Too Big to Fail
by Andrew Sorkin
This is a minute-by-minute account of how the whole financial system nearly went over the brink in 2008, and the astonishing sense of tension and danger involved. It starts with Bear Stearns in trouble and then just charges along. I thought it would take ten years before anything like this came out. Andrew Sorkin is a real insider. But the thing that’s amazing about it is it’s an absolutely in-the-room, vivid story of the unravelling.
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“I didn’t understand how the economy had got into the current mess. So this was a fascinating story of greed and disregard for process.” Read more...
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Juliet Davenport, Environmentalist
“This is a minute-by-minute account of how the whole financial system nearly went over the brink in 2008, and the astonishing sense of tension and danger involved.” Read more...
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John Lanchester, Journalist
Andrew Ross Sorkin is one of the most talented reporters working today and Too Big To Fail is a testament to that. Like Bad Blood, Sorkin’s book is exhaustively researched, detailed and informative, but most of all, it’s absolutely damning in its indictment of those described—namely, everyone involved or adjacent to the global economic car crash of 2008. Sorkin shows the pernicious side of modern-day capitalism, and throughout this patient account, you get the sense that the financial sector (and, by extension, modern consumer society at large) would be unrecognizable—nonexistent, even—without government bailouts.
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