The Unprecedented Efforts to Stabilize the Global Financial System: An Inside Look at the Wall Street and Washington Alliance to Avoid Catastrophe

Joyce B.: Great book! Describes in detail all events happening from Bear Sterns failure to government's bailouts as part of TARP.

However, interest in the story starts declining after Lehman's bankruptcy.

United States on Jul 18, 2023

RichJB: The book arrived as promised & was in good condition. I have read other non-fiction books & have found them a bit tedious & preachy - not "Too Big to Fail" though. It is a very readable book!

Canada on Apr 12, 2023

Kamil K.: Condition of the book was not what I would describe as very good

United Kingdom on Mar 17, 2023

Ravi Balakrishnan: If you want an insider account of how things unraveled during the few crisis week - this is "the" book to read. This book covers details on how different things came together to solve the crisis. A little details on the financial jargons (CDO, CDS, etc) would have made it an easy read. However, I spent some pre read on the web to get context. You don't need fundamentals of finance to read the book.

India on Feb 20, 2022

Peter de Toma sen.: I recommend reading this book and comparing it with "Europa braucht den Euro nicht" - excellently researched and written by Thilo Sarrazin - and "Der Markt hat nicht immer Recht" by Wilfried Stadler, ex-CEO, industry insider, university professor - both books rated with 5 stars.

The most important milestones in "Too Big to Fail" are spread across approx. 40 pages - out of 618 pages. Therefore it is necessary to study this book carefully to get the "nuggets".

Here are some of the key points:

Wall Street firms had debt to capital ratios of 32 to 1.
There were, of course, Cassandras ... Professors Roubini and Shiller.
This book isn't so much about the theoretical as it is about real people, the reality behind the scenes.
Lehman Brothers was leveraged 30.7 to 1; Merrill Lynch was only slightly better, at 26.9 to 1.

The subprime market had mushroomed to $2 trillion, it was still just a fraction of the overall $14 trillion U.S. mortgage market. Securities were being amalgamated, sliced up, and reconfigured again, and soon became the underpinnings of new investment products marketed as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

The uptick rule: a...

Germany on Jan 10, 2013

M. Hillmann: Hindsight is a wonderful thing and books are normally written with the benefit of hindsight. But this account of the response to the catastrophic events in 2008 of as they unfold, portrays the uncertainty and momentousness of the decisions made on a day to day basis to prevent world financial meltdown. It provides a gripping, page turning read even for someone unfamiliar with Wall Street.

Sorkin touches on the seeds to the disaster - the deregulation of the banks in the late 1990's. the push to increase home ownership which encouraged lax mortgage standards, historically low interest rates. which created the liquidity bubble, and the system of Wall street compensation that rewarded short - term risk taking. They all came together to create the perfect storm.

The account of the battle to save Wall Street interweaves the responses and actions of many of the leading players from Hank Paulson of the US Treasury, Tim Geithner President of the New York Federal Reserve, to CEO's, legal advisors and other key characters in the 9 major banks, and the key insurance and mortgage companies. With the sheer number and complexity of the simultaneous negotiations, this could lead to...

United Kingdom on Aug 31, 2010

JD: Since so many people have given a blow by blow account of this book and their love or hate of it, no more needs to be said about the content. It gets 4 stars because although the book is well written, Sorkin could have said what he had to say in 400 or less pages. The other annoying feature when an author jumps around in time, is that he did not put a year or month when he segued into another subject or time. Aside from being a real eye opener on how the Feds and Treasury worked behind the scenes and the near incestuous relationship of the bankers and the government, it is worrisome to think that those that done the bad deed were so closely aligned with them that had to fix it and us who have to pay for all the fixes.

What may be an interesting story to tell that illustrates how interconnected all these factions were might go like this.

Once upon a time near a beautiful ocean with deep blue waters a giant octopus would swim freely deep beneath the surface feasting on all the little creatures of the sea, sometimes destroying their habitat, sometimes just wiping out other species. The octopus eventually became so over bloated from gorging himself on other creatures he...

United States on Jan 31, 2010

David L. Bahnsen: The litany of books on the 2008 economic crisis covers a lot of ground. There are a plethora of good books that have come out thus far (and plenty of bad ones). My reading has already taken me through some books that I find dangerous in their ideology, but also some that are remarkably astute. What I have not come across until this latest addition to the series is a book that was nearly impossible to put down. Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail put an end to that. While I have over a dozen books to complete still in this project, and am backed up more than that with books I have completed but not yet reviewed, I can safely say that no book will prove to be as much fun to read as Sorkin's. I recommend it for any reader who has the ability to take down over 500 pages of a brilliantly-written suspense thriller.

Sorkin's book does something that very few books written about the crisis will be able to do: It narrates a series of events with virtually no ideology or partisanship whatsoever. I can honestly say that after finishing the book I still had no idea what Sorkin believes about the TARP bill, the nature of Wall Street, the role of lawmakers in causing the collapse, the...

United States on Dec 28, 2009