Great read! 2010-08-23

Reviewer: Nick Scarletta

I found this a terrific read, especially after reading The Big Short. It was surprisingly entertaining and enlightening to the behind-the-scenes action of the months during the crisis. My suggestion would be to create a cheat-sheet on who's who as they appear in the book. There are so many people involved that some of the secondary people got lost as to who they worked for and what their titles were. I found that the method of endnotes in the back of the book a bit weak considering I didn't know they existed until after the near 600 pages of reading.

A tough slog 2010-08-10

Reviewer: Bradley F. Smith

No miniscule detail of the 08 meltdown of Lehman Brothers goes unreported here. Right down to the exact time of day on which whatever Wall Street or Federal Reserve fat cat said what to whom is reported, resulting in a very long tick-tock that I found to be tough slogging. The author creates a sense of drama in each scene, which were actually just grey-suited middle-aged men sitting at their desks or conference tables or talking on the phone to their counterparts. A cataclysm was under way, but the look of it all was business as usual, had you been a fly on the wall at the time. This book could have been boiled down to about half its length. Whenever newspaper reporters get a chance to write a book, however, they indulge in length because that is exactly what they can't do in the space-constricted newspaper, in this case, the NYT. So, you get notebook emptying on the page here.

A must read! 2010-08-09

Reviewer: vsri

This is a MUST read for anyone who wants to know how things unfolded during the Great Recession.

OK, if you want only the middle of the story 2010-07-29

Reviewer: Jeff in Santa Cruz

Too Big To Fail is a big book, which juicy portraits of all the principal characters who wrecked the world economy and those few that tried to prevent it from falling off a cliff (although even a couple years later, we're still perched on the edge). Everyone comes off badly, and no one seems particularly smart, heroic, or tragic; rather, everyone seems like a character from an episode of The Sopranos. The book starts without much prelude; in fact, it launches into the crisis AFTER the Bear Stearns bail-out. The book ends after Treasury forces a capital infusion in the 9 largest banks and broker-dealers, which signaled a calming of the markets but did nothing to deal with all the toxic assets the banks held (a problem later dealt with in a temporary way by Bernanke's "quantitative easing" program, not covered in the book). The much heralded TARP turned out to be an idiotic idea. Sorkin focuses on the banks and broker-dealers, but generally ignores what everyone else (including hedge funds, rating agencies, and the Fed) did during the crisis. The actions of Tim Geitner and the New York Federal Reserve certainly require more scrutiny, but you won't find much in Sorkin's book. Should Lehman have been bailed out? Given that every other financial institution was bailed out, it sure seems so. A few days after Lehman filed bankruptcy, Paulson and Geitner orchestrated the bailout of AIG, an insurance company, the cost of which would later exceed $180 billion.

Detailed play by play needs more analysis 2010-07-29

Reviewer: Eric Remy

I'll echo the comments of many of the other mediocre reviews here. This book is an amazingly detailed play-by-play report of the weeks around the bankruptcy of Lehman and the various mergers, bailouts, rescue plans and all the rest. If you want to know what Dick Fuld ate for breakfast the day Lehman filed for bankruptcy, it's probably in here, as are the details of phone call after phone call, various merger meetings, etc.

What's not in here is any detailed analysis of why all these companies ended up where they were. This is especially noticeable when he discusses AIG- you get a few pages talking about how every time someone looks at the books their situation seems worse, but how AIG ended up holding the hot potato (and why it was uniquely able to take on massive risk without affecting its credit rating) is cursory at best and missing at worst. There's virtually no real discussion of Moodys and the other rating agencies and *why* they rated toxic assets as AAA, the real lynchpin of the entire failure.

This also tends to lend a too sympathetic air to the treatment of the companies, the CEOs and the various people in the federal government and reserve banks- Sorkin's book has a tendency to treat them as folks heroically scrambling to find any way to save their poor beleaguered firms. A detailed analysis would show the string of awful decisions by a host of folks who should have seen it coming- this wasn't a natural disaster, it was a planned event, carefully sculpted by people who thought they were far smarter than they actually were.