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Hardcover
624 pages
ISBN 9780670021253 Published Oct. 2009
Viking Books
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Posted July 15, 2010 10:51 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
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.
Jack Covert Selects - The Zeroes
Posted July 15, 2010 10:42 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Every decade seems to have a nickname: The Roaring Twenties and The Swinging Sixties, for example. Randall Lane makes a strong case for the past decade to be christened The Zeroes. In his new memoir of the same name, Lane—cofounder and editor of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker magazines—tells the story of his own experiences during that decade of financial excess that we all are now paying for.
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin is still the definitive book about the actual banking crisis that changed our world so radically. The Zeroes offers more of a People magazine (or possibly TMZ) look at how we got here. And that is not an insult. The entertainment rag aspect comes from the author’s willingness to name names and pull no punches when describing, with an insider’s eye, the excesses of the decade. The people gracing these pages include Sen. John McCain gambling at a craps table and ex-Major League Baseball player Lenny Dykstra behaving as an authority on the stock market.
As a magazine publisher—the traders loved the PR he could provide—Lane was smack dab in the middle of the lunacy. This unique view—a bit like Alice in Wonderland—is presented with the use of a self-deprecating humor that pervades the book and creates sympathy for a man misled by opportunity.
What Michael Lewis did for ‘80s traders in Liar’s Poker, Randall Lane has now done for trader rock stars of The Zeroes. You will be stunned by the craziness and cautioned by the consequences.
Jack Covert Selects - Freefall
Posted Jan. 15, 2010 6:26 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
We recently named Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail the best business book of 2009. It is an engrossing narrative account of the lead up to, and actors involved in, the creation and handling of the recent economic upheaval. It is a great work of journalistic reportage, and an important documentation of the events. Joseph E. Stiglitz has now weighed in on the crisis, which he and many others are calling the Great Recession, from another perspective—an economist’s—in his new book, Freefall.
There are a lot of strong opinions in Freefall, and though you may not agree with all of them, Stiglitz’s sober and concise evaluation of the forces that brought upon the Great Recession and the current situation is hard to argue with. It is also hard to stomach at times, as you come to realize how unnecessary the crisis was. Not only was it a decidedly man-made disaster, many educated and experienced persons—including the author—foresaw and warned against its likelihood for years before it hit. It was not something that “just happened.”
There are bad outcomes that are the fault of no single individual. But this crisis was the result of actions, decisions, and argument by those in the financial sector. The system that failed us so miserably didn’t just happen. It was created. Indeed, many worked hard—and spent good money—to ensure it took the shape that it did.
Working in government and as the chief economist at the World Bank, Stiglitz saw that system take shape and uses much of the book to explain how it came to be, how it fell and the response to its failure in great detail. It is not only about addressing the past and what went wrong, though; it is about finding a way forward. As Stiglitz writes:
It is said that a near-death experience forces one to reevaluate priorities and values. The global economy has just had a near-death experience.
He later sums up:
We have seen the danger. The question is … Will we seize the opportunity to create a new financial system that will create meaningful jobs, decent work for all those that want it … in which each individual is able to fulfill his aspirations and live up to his potential? … These are the opportunities. The real danger now is that we will not seize them.
Freefall is a great addition to a building canon of work on the Great Recession that will surely be studied by economists and historians for a long time to come. We can only hope that the contemporary leadership on Wall Street and Capitol Hill takes notice of these great books as well.
Jack Covert Selects - Too Big To Fail
Posted Nov. 16, 2009 3:32 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
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, Viking Books, 624 pages, $32.95, Hardcover, October 2009, ISBN 9780670021253
Even though Too Big to Fail was written during the same year as the recent financial collapse occurred, Andrew Ross Sorkin has written what I predict will be the definitive book on the subject. It not only tells a gripping “perfect storm” story—with all the gory details as our 401k’s disappeared and our financial system became nationalized included—but the author humanizes all the players, resulting in an imminently readable, albeit lengthy, book.
Each of the major players are shown here—warts and all. Sorkin takes us inside of Henry Paulson’s mind as the Secretary of the Treasury tries to get a grip on the collapse of the investment banks. We see Timothy Geithner “clearly overwhelmed, his eyes darting around his office as he nervously twisted a pen between his fingers.” And Ben Bernanke who sits “politely nodding in his best professorial manner.”
Most riveting are Sorkin’s descriptions of the meetings between the government representatives and the heavy-hitting and heavily-hit CEOs, bringing to mind Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s classic, Barbarians at the Gate. Sorkin describes a call to arms between financial competitors to save such institutions as Lehman, Bank of America, and AIG before the government would get involved this way: “The CEOs had all been milling about, tapping away on their BlackBerrys, and pouring themselves cups of ice water to cool themselves from the miasma of humidity that hung in the [New York Federal Reserve Building]. After the meeting, “the bankers left expressionless and mute, dumbstruck at the magnitude of the work that lay before them.”
Sorkin does not act as only a dispassionate observer, however, and includes his own informed deductions. “Unless those regulations are changed radically … there will continue to be firms that are too big to fail. And when the next, inevitable bubble bursts, the cycle will only repeat itself.” It’s a sobering reflection, but a critical reminder that there is still extreme risk involved when there is extreme reward at stake.
For this kind of book to work, the secret is effective story telling. Bob Woodward has done this kind of reporting for years, and Theodore White’s great The Making of the President series that started in 1960 is the father of the genre. Now Andrew Sorkin has now joined them. Great stories, detailed insider information; it is what places this book among the greats.
