Too Big to Fail


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Hardcover
624 pages
ISBN 9780670021253 Published Oct. 2009
Viking Books
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Too Big to Fail
The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- And Themselves
By Andrew Ross Sorkin 

Related Blog Posts
And the Winner of The FT/Goldman Sachs Award Is...
Posted Oct. 28, 2010 10:43 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year was announced last night at The Pierre in New York City, and it was something of an upset. Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, released by Princeton University Press in May, beat out more widely recognized and commercially successful books like Michael Lewis's The Big Short and Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail (which was the runner up last night, and which we named The 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year in 2009).

The award was presented by Lionel Barber, FT editor and chair of the judging panel, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs who recused himself as a judge because of the number of books on the shortlist about the financial crisis—books he was a character in having been the head of a major Wall Street firm during the crisis.

From FT City Editor Andrew Hill's write up of last night's event:

Prof Rajan was the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist when he warned the 2005 Jackson Hole conference of central bankers that the seeds of disaster were being sown in the financial sector. His presentation jarred with the self-congratulatory tone of the conference, Alan Greenspan’s last as chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Prof Rajan writes in the book that the critical reaction from other participants made him feel “like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions”. But within three years, his analysis had been vindicated.
And here's just an example (from the book's introduction, linked to in the quote above) of the clarity you'll find in Rajan's latest analysis:

We should ... resist the view that this is just another crisis, similar to every financial crisis before it, with real estate and foreign capital flows at its center. Although there are broad similarities in the things that go wrong in every finan­cial crisis, this one centered on what many would agree is the most sophisticated financial system in the world. What happened to the usual regulatory checks and balances? What happened to the discipline imposed by markets? What hap­pened to the private instinct for self-­preservation? Is the free-­enterprise system fundamentally broken? These questions would not arise if this were “just an­ other” crisis in a developing country. And given the cost of this crisis, we can­ not afford facile or wrong answers.

Although I believe that the basic ideas of the free-enterprise system are sound, the fault lines that precipitated this crisis are indeed systemic. They stem from more than just specific personalities or institutions. A much wider cast of characters shares responsibility for the crisis: it includes domestic politicians, foreign governments, economists like me, and people like you. Furthermore, what enveloped all of us was not some sort of collective hysteria or mania. Some­what frighteningly, each one of us did what was sensible given the incentives we faced. Despite mounting evidence that things were going wrong, all of us clung to the hope that things would work out fine, for our interests lay in that outcome. Collectively, however, our actions took the world’s economy to the brink of dis­aster, and they could do so again unless we recognize what went wrong and take the steps needed to correct it.

Hopefully, the recognition of Raghuram Rajan and his book will help those on Wall Street—many of whom, I'm sure, were in the room to congratulate him on his work last night, maybe even presenting the award to him—take a deeper look at the fissures in the system they've created and continue the process of correcting it. Hell, who am I kidding, hopefully it will help really start that process.

For more on the award, head to FT.com to read excerpts from the books on the shortlist and see Andrew Hill's conversation with Professor Rajan at last night's ceremony.



The Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book Award: The Shortlist
Posted Sept. 16, 2010 8:30 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The shortlist for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year has been announced. As with the longlist for the award, it is dominated by books covering the recent financial turmoil. The only two covering other topics are:

The books on the shortlist that cover the crisis are:

Three of the books that made the shortlist—The Art of Choosing, The Big Short and Too Big to Fail—were Jack Covert Selects when they were released, and Too Big to Fail was the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year in 2009.*

To read more about the judges and how they came to their decision, head on over to Andrew Hill's coverage of their meeting at FT.com. We'll let you know in late October who takes home the final prize.

*Submit your books to the 2010 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards today.



A Defense of Business Books
Posted Aug. 27, 2010 10:47 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

It's a common reaction. When I explain to people that I work for a bookstore that specializes in business books, most people either furrow their brows or wrinkle their noses. Sometimes this reaction is caused by confusion as bookstores, to most people, are brick and mortar locations that display New York Times best selling fiction, spin racks of greeting cards, and children's pictures books. When that happens, I try to explain, in a nutshell, the origin of our company: we are what is left of the Harry W. Schwartz bookshops, an independent chain of bookstores in Milwaukee that regretfully closed their doors last year. Then I briefly tackle the evolution of our branch of the company: we began selling books mainly to corporate libraries, but that service grew to include speaking events and corporate training programs, then blossomed further into all the work we do online connecting with lovers of business books and connoisseurs of great ideas.

That is the other cause of the consternation. Most people I talk with outside of work aren't business book lovers. In fact, for many people, the only business book they remember hearing about is Who Moved My Cheese, and regardless of how you feel about that particular book, most people don't have any clue just how broad and deep the business book genre is. I've had a plain-speaking tennis league teammate of mine ask, after an explanation of what I do for a living: "So...who reads that stuff?" And just last night, another attempt to explain my job was interrupted with: "Well...I don't think there really are any business books out there worth reading."

Now, I don't like to turn a night at the bar into a lecture on the value of business books, but when confronted with a face that is scrunched up in skepticism or confusion or simple disbelief that there can be anything interesting or even enchanting about the business book category, I try to quickly explain that while you may sit next to someone on an airplane or exercise bike who is reading something practical (though possible unappealing to you) like Getting Things Done, there really is something for everyone in a genre of books that stretches from investigative non-fiction, to novel, to screenplay, to practical advice, inspiring biography.

I find myself recommending books like Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success to my tennis teammates; The Female Vision: Women's Real Power at Work to my graduate school friends; Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die to my husband, a high school teacher.

This defense of the business book genre and all the sub-genres within echoes the current--and continual--debate about the true value of literary fiction, the undervaluing of genre fiction like fantasy and sci-fi, the misnomer that all fiction by women read by women qualifies as "chick-lit." The fervor over the unrestrained praise of Jonathon Franzen's new novel, Freedom (read more here, here, here, here, and here) is just the most recent example.

For whatever reason, elitism is alive and well when it comes to one's reading preferences. (I'm going to ignore here the current, very elitist, discussions about how reading or publishing a paper book is or is not superior to using an e-reader. I think we've all had a lot of that this week.) Some of this is stubbornness. We put blinders on when it comes to crossing genres. I know that I am loathe to listen to someone expound on the high-quality of science-fiction as I'm not one to be drawn into fictional and fantastical worlds, but at the same time, despite my literature degree, I'm a fan of English police procedurals and a variety of other crime and detective novels. I think I'm an able enough critic to know whether I like a book strictly based on entertainment value versus some truly good writing, but regardless, I'll defend my preferred genre. Some of it is ignorance. Because the business book genre was indeed limited to technical titles or fables about moved cheese for quite a long time, it is hard to spread the word and have people take you seriously that the genre has simply exploded over the course of the past decade.

And so it is that I find myself often defending the business book genre. Whether you have an interest in game theory, a fascination with the sharks on Wall Street and Washington, a desire to create a more balanced work environment for your employees, a need for a retirement plan, a fear of change, or you want to read a great story reminiscent of Mad Men, you can find (with our help if you don't know where to start) a quality book with depth and nuance that strives to be something more than a series of action steps. People in the United States spend a predominant portion of their lives working, and I am a passionate believer that the business book genre contributes to better work environments, improved personal happiness, and increasingly keener intellects.



The Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book Award: The Longlist
Posted Aug. 9, 2010 7:23 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The longlist for The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year was announced this morning. And just as interesting as the list itself, which includes a novel this year, is the fact that Lloyd Blankfein is recusing himself as a judge. He is doing so because "a number of books on this year’s longlist address various aspects of the financial crisis," a crisis Blankfein was intimately involved in as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Hi is, in fact, a subject in some of those books—including Too Big to Fail, which we named the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year* in 2009.

The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs longlist for 2010 is:

*A reminder to authors and publishers out there, we are now accepting submissions for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards for 2010.



Jack Covert Selects - Diary of a Very Bad Year
Posted July 15, 2010 10:51 a.m. by 800-ceo-read

Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by n+1, Keith Gessen & Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, Harper Perennial, 260 pages, $14.99, Paperback, June 2010, ISBN 9780061965302

Keith Gessen is the founder of n+1, a mostly literary magazine out of New York City, and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, which, as you can probably gather from the title, is also thoroughly literary. So, how is it that he has now penned one of the most fascinating books to date on the recent calamity on Wall Street?

It began as concern for a friend who had borrowed against his home in a time of financial trouble. To figure out how deflating home prices were going to affect this friend, he did an interview for n+1 with an anonymous hedge fund manager he calls HFM. That interview turned into a series of interviews spanning two years, “from the first rumblings of the crisis in the fall of 2007 to the late summer of 2009....” The timing was serendipitous.

As the subprime crisis quickly spirals into a wide array of other crises, you’re given an intimate account of it all through the lens of someone watching from the twentieth floor. It is by turns tragic, introspective and wildly funny. It is always very intelligent and, above all, touchingly human. At the end of Chapter 2, “The Death of Bear,” we find HFM reacting to the quickly worsening situation with a bit of gallows humor.

n+1: So you look out here onto midtown on the twentieth floor. This is all going to be okay?

HFM: That guy there will lose his job. White shirt, futzing about—he’ll lose his job. He’s putting. There’s going to be no room for people like that, the bar is higher. You can’t play golf in your office during a crisis.

[…]

That guy’s done! Everyone else is okay.

There are books on the crisis whose breadth is seemingly larger—Too Big To Fail, The Big Short, The End of Wall Street. The story lines in those books are sweeping, the personalities larger than life. This book’s wealth is in its details, the book’s character anonymous but close and personable. When reading Diary of a Very Bad Year, the details gather into a more intimate experience of that wider picture and its sobering implications.






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