Too Big to Fail by Andress Ross Sorkin: Book Review

I’ve just finished reading: Too Big to Fail by Andress Ross Sorkin, and I really enjoyed it. It reads like a novel and takes you through the events, people and stories around the financial panic last year. It starts off with JP Morgan agreeing to buy Bear Sterns and ends after the government decides to inject billions of dollars in the top financial institutions last October.

The book is entertaining, and I found it hard to keep it down once I started reading it. It is easy to read and focuses on the people, their stories and emotions, rather than delve deep on the technical matters related to the crisis. It is written for everyone, and is not just for people interested in Wall Street or finances in general.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has recreated a lot of conversations, and that makes the book really great. It makes you feel you are going through the events yourself, and adds real flavor to the whole thing.

Conversations were something I wasn’t expecting from the book, and as far as I am concerned, that’s the thing that makes the book great.

These conversations and stories are recreated from the author’s interviews with top officials and a lot of these stories have appeared for the first time anywhere.

These are things like secret Paulson – Goldman meeting, Warren Buffet sending a 4 page letter to Treasury to outline a plan of how they could buy toxic assets to improve the situation, or just innocuous little things like Geithner’s preference for the “F” word.

I don’t think I have read such stories anywhere else, and all of them come together to make a very enthralling sequence of events, which is put together quite nicely.

I really enjoyed the book, and as I said before, it took all my spare time the last couple of weeks. If you have time for a 600 page book, and are interested in this kind of stuff, you should give it a try too.

I have no complaints about the book, but this post contains affiliate links (more about that at the bottom of this page), so if you plan to buy it, I suggest you read some bad reviews of the book too.

One thought on “Too Big to Fail by Andress Ross Sorkin: Book Review”

  1. Sorkin is just another scheming, avaricious Jayson Blair, only this time it’s the old ‘you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’ -syndrome with the Wall Street gang. The desperately, frantic NY Times appears to be willing to stoop to any level to boost readership. What a crime that the top dogs not only sanction, but laud this dude. Doesn’t anyone ever broach the subject of ethics, integrity or for that matter, just plain civility over there? The Times seems to have a penchant for.these same vulgar, crass, overreaching lowlifes. And Sorkin is just looking to make another buck at whomever’s expense he has to. If the NY Times is looking for a linchpin in its rapidly encroaching demise, it might want to more rigorously scrutinize this self-aggrandizing enfant terrible , and not be so outrageously dismissive of its other staff. Star Financial Reporter, my eye! Wasn’t Jason Blair enough for them?

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