Jonathan Ng
HST-335
Book report
In Andrew Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves,” readers are immersed into the narrative account of the financial crisis that gripped the U.S. in 2008 as told from the perspective of those who created it, the bankers, the traders, and the brokers.
Sorkin, a mergers and acquisition reporter at The New York Times, makes it clear he will not delve too deeply into economic theory; rather, the book provides a fly-on-the-wall insight into the main actors of the financial crisis including Wall Street chief executives, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and central bankers such as Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke.
The premise behind the book and its title, "too big to fail," is that the financial institutions is so important to the U.S. economy that the central bank must take measures to prevent it from going bankrupt. Those institutions prepared for the bankruptcies included the Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Morgan
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One one side, there are those that advocate a completely "free" market in which the government takes little or no role, like laissez-faire. The other, are socialist or communist countries where the government controls the economy, or owns key sectors of industry. The U.S. regulates the financial industry, but traditionally has maintained a free market economy where the government does not directly own financial institutions. Sorkin expresses his own opinion that too little has been done in the way of regulation to prevent a similar crisis in the future. One theme that persists is greed that fuels the "rational irrationality." Sources generally agree that Wall Street bankers and traders couldn't resist doing these shoddy deals because everyone else was doing it and the profits were