Bizzy's Reviews > Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

This book is an exhaustive account of everything that went on at Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Wall Street banks affected by the 2008 financial crisis starting shortly after the failure of Bear Stearns and ending shortly after TARP was signed into law. However, I think it’s less of an objective recounting than it’s meant to be, and in many places the author prioritizes details at the expense of context.

For one thing, I know this book has a lot to cover but I don't think it should have relied on readers' existing knowledge about the crisis to understand the scope of the issues or why problems at one company imperiled the entire financial system. The book mentions in passing that CDOs intertwined the banks, but the author should have provided more background facts. So much of the narrative requires you to take as a given that these companies had to be saved, and it's difficult for the reader to assess whether they agree with any of the actions taken without those background facts. Nor is the reader given the context necessary to understand the decision making within each bank that led to and exacerbated the crisis. The author writes in the afterword that “[o]ne of the great lessons of the crisis was that CEOs who were perceived as all-knowing actually often had no idea what was taking place within their institutions only one floor below them, let alone across oceans on the other side of the world,” but the book doesn’t touch on this at all or allow the reader to arrive at this conclusion themselves. It’s entirely focused on how a handful of the highest-ranking people at a few of the biggest banks reacted as the crisis unfolded, sometimes myopically so.

Additionally, the book goes into such detail about the endless meetings and calls between bankers and the government that it obscures how the narrative is often biased. Reciting facts without explicitly stating your opinion doesn’t make your writing unbiased; as any lawyer who’s written a statement of facts in a brief knows, you can easily create a narrative with purely factual statements based on what you say vs. leave out. The same is true here: plenty of facts are left out, creating a narrative biased in favor of Wall Street (especially Lehman Brothers, for some reason), whether or not that was the author’s intent. A great example is the description of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy hearing, which was something like eight hours long, yet the author says virtually nothing about the various legal arguments and focuses on the judge’s lamentations about the fall of a “great company” and how people cried at the end. If the intent was to inform the reader that the bankruptcy was complex, contentious, and quickly approved, the details about the lamentations and crying could have been left out. Spending so much time on how unfair Fuld (the head of Lehman) and others thought it was for the government to allow Lehman to fail makes it seem like Sorkin endorses this view, especially because the opposing viewpoint isn't shared in the same way. The book as a whole effectively makes the point that the government's decisions regarding Bear vs. Lehman vs. others made sense at the time given the information everyone had, but this is undermined by Sorkin's inexplicable treatment of Fuld as a sympathetic and tragic figure.

Similarly, there’s almost no mention of the impact of the book’s events on anyone other than executives – not even the Lehman and other employees who lost their jobs, even though that could easily have fallen within the book’s admittedly narrow scope.

Finally, this book is such a Great Man Theory of History book, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know how much to blame the author for that, since it’s a ubiquitous method of telling these types of stories, but to read this book you’d think that bank CEOs and Biglaw partners do everything by themselves and have no support staff. And the author loves telling you people’s rags-to-riches stories whenever possible, even when they’re of little relevance, but less “inspiring” origin stories are left out. It creates this false impression that everyone you read about in the book got there purely through hard work and being smarter than everyone else.

My nonfiction reviews always wind up being 95% critical no matter how much I enjoyed the book – I guess I just don’t have as much to say about the parts I enjoyed. I thought this book was illuminating, especially regarding the complexity of Treasury’s decision making and the inadequacy of simplified narratives of what happened and why the government acted differently regarding Bear vs. Lehman vs. AIG vs. others. But I think when reading this, it’s just as important to think about what’s been left out as what’s been included.