Of course, the majority of all such insurance came from a single company, but la-dee-da.ĭon’t understand how this all works? Don’t worry, you can be the CEO. Because this security was filled with mortgages that might possibly – and quite probably would – default, investment firms took out insurance as a hedge. This security could then be sold to investors, and the fees pocketed. One of the ways high finance accomplished this feat was to bundle up subprime mortgages into a new kind of investment security. Those who work there are quick to state their importance to the functioning of the economy, but the main purpose is to make money, and lots of it. No one is quite sure what happens in this fantasyland. And in early October, with a stroke of the president’s pen, the Treasury – and by extension, American taxpayers – became part-owners in what were once the nation’s proudest financial institutions, a rescue that would have seemed unthinkable only months earlier…”Īaron Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail takes you on a journey into the enchanted, fairy-tale realm of high finance. Two mortgage-lending giants and the world’s largest insurer were placed under government control. Each of the former Big Five investment banks failed, was sold, or was converted into a bank holding company. “In the span of just a few months, the shape of Wall Street and the global financial system changed almost beyond recognition. This true story is not just a look at banks that were “too big to fail,” it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing neverdisclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world’s financial system would experience.

“We’ve got to get some foam down on the runway!” a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world’s economy.

Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami.

Too big to fail by andrew ross sorkin