Too Big to Fail

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis—and Lost/Andrew Sorkin 600 pg.

From what I hear, and I've heard a lot about things like this, lately, because Christa has been on a real nonfiction-about-world-class-financial-incompetence binge, it seems this book is a little on the tedious side, but in general has some points to make about the whole mess ("The Financial Meltdown") that aren't necessarily brought out in the other books. It concentrates on the inability of certain individuals to see an incipient trainwreck whose jobs, you would have thought, would be to see such things. For instance, Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Bros, seemed to feel that three clicks of his ruby slippers would ward off the inevitable, even after the inevitable had become actual fact. In the longer view, however, the widely-held belief on the part of the captains of the global financial industry that things must not be as bad as they would appear echo, to one degree or another, myriad points in the the history of civilization in which those in power could not envision events that would fundamentally change their landscape. It would be interesting to know whether, at places like Goldman Sachs who emerged empowered by the debacle, this myopia was overcome or was merely rendered less pivotal by other factors. - Dave