![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileHell, I am running out of things to say for reviews about finance books. At least I decide to branch out author-wise this time!
I read Too Big To Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, for once, is not Michael Lewis, so now I can officially say I have learned things about finance from sources other than Michael Lewis and my dad rambling about what assholes everybody in the business is.
This book is pretty much a blow-by-blow account of every thing everyone on Wall Street, at the Treasury, and at the Fed said and did around the time the crisis hit. The book covers roughly from the Bear Stearns bailout to the passing of TARP, and includes extremely detailed coverage of the failure of Lehman Brothers, which is remarkably suspenseful considering that we all know Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy at the end. It is also well told enough to have some pathos, without engaging in whiny apologetics about how banking executives are the REAL victims here, like some commentary I have seen. Everyone says "fuck" a lot, obviously. There is a set of picture spreads about halfway through the book, which is a thing I love to bits in historical nonfiction, but sadly, this book is not yet old enough for that to be either informative or entertaining--it's basically dozens of pictures of almost identical-looking middle-aged white guys in suits. I think there's one women and one Korean dude in their somewhere.
A thing that might be a downside of this book to other readers but which I did not mind so much, due to it being the third or fourth book on the financial crisis that I've read, is that it contains very little discussion of what any of these financial products are or how they work--really just the absolute bare bones needed to follow the story, usually one sentence or less. Most of the book is more of a human drama, full of people on the phone yelling at each other, running around trying to make all sorts of iffy deals with anyone who will make them, trying to avoid going bankrupt and having the entire financial system collapse. Treasury Secretary Paulson appears in a state of High Pissed-Offedness for 95% of the book, and throwing up for the rest of it. Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, spends most of the book basically in denial about how bad things really are for his firm. Warren Buffett shows up periodically when people beg him to make deals with them, looks at all the banks' crappy assets, and decides this shit is too wacky for him, he's going home, thanks. It is all very dramatic and power-grabby. It is even full of funny one-liners, sometimes! All it needs is a bunch of naked people and they could put it on HBO.
I read Too Big To Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, for once, is not Michael Lewis, so now I can officially say I have learned things about finance from sources other than Michael Lewis and my dad rambling about what assholes everybody in the business is.
This book is pretty much a blow-by-blow account of every thing everyone on Wall Street, at the Treasury, and at the Fed said and did around the time the crisis hit. The book covers roughly from the Bear Stearns bailout to the passing of TARP, and includes extremely detailed coverage of the failure of Lehman Brothers, which is remarkably suspenseful considering that we all know Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy at the end. It is also well told enough to have some pathos, without engaging in whiny apologetics about how banking executives are the REAL victims here, like some commentary I have seen. Everyone says "fuck" a lot, obviously. There is a set of picture spreads about halfway through the book, which is a thing I love to bits in historical nonfiction, but sadly, this book is not yet old enough for that to be either informative or entertaining--it's basically dozens of pictures of almost identical-looking middle-aged white guys in suits. I think there's one women and one Korean dude in their somewhere.
A thing that might be a downside of this book to other readers but which I did not mind so much, due to it being the third or fourth book on the financial crisis that I've read, is that it contains very little discussion of what any of these financial products are or how they work--really just the absolute bare bones needed to follow the story, usually one sentence or less. Most of the book is more of a human drama, full of people on the phone yelling at each other, running around trying to make all sorts of iffy deals with anyone who will make them, trying to avoid going bankrupt and having the entire financial system collapse. Treasury Secretary Paulson appears in a state of High Pissed-Offedness for 95% of the book, and throwing up for the rest of it. Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, spends most of the book basically in denial about how bad things really are for his firm. Warren Buffett shows up periodically when people beg him to make deals with them, looks at all the banks' crappy assets, and decides this shit is too wacky for him, he's going home, thanks. It is all very dramatic and power-grabby. It is even full of funny one-liners, sometimes! All it needs is a bunch of naked people and they could put it on HBO.