The Minutes, Minute-by-Minute
The result of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s painstaking research and assembly of sources and information for his account of the Wall Street collapse of 2008 is Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—And Themselves, a tome of unprecedented comprehensibility. The list of players (“and the companies they kept”) encompasses the kind of cast description usually reserved for Dostoyevsky novels; the book itself has a similar epic quality. Though the events played out over a scant seven months of 2008, Sorkin imbues the proceedings with background aplenty, often bringing a company from its 19th century roots all the way through to the crash of ought-eight.
Too Big to Fail starts off with an intensity that barely flags throughout its 500-plus page length; Sorkin, who took three months off from his day job at The New York Times to tackle this book, gathered hundreds of documents, interviews, and correspondence and this impressive display of journalistic acumen pays off in the form of a seamless narrative dominated by the huge personalities (and comparable tempers) of some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures, all of whom fought tooth and nail to keep the system afloat last year.
Sorkin’s intimate descriptions of hundreds of top-stakes meetings are fascinating, and, in hindsight, guiltily enjoyable. If the book has a shortcoming, it is probably that it is too encompassing—but we can appreciate that Sorkin was loathe to make cuts, given the epic proportion of the story and the personalities involved. But, if one can excuse such a minor fault, Too Big to Fail is as intimate a description of the market crash as we will ever see.
Risky Business
Though some readers may detect a note (or even a chord) of acid in Charles Gasparino’s The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System, the author professes that his goal in writing the book was simply to depict the wide range of events that led up to the fall of Wall Street. His tack, however, is decidedly more populist: “to explore how the combination of government policies that encouraged home ownership even for people who couldn’t afford to pay their mortgages and Wall Street’s greed had led the country into economic despair and ended American dominance of the world’s financial system.” Any potential negative impressions of Gasparino’s past work—the content of his 2005 book, Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors may have made potential sources somewhat reluctant to speak to him—are handily offset by the painstaking detail provided in his notes (which, by themselves, are good reading).
Gasparino’s book achieves a similar level of thoroughness as Sorkin’s, though his approach is decidedly more sharply barbed. Beginning with the junk- bond kings of the 1970s, Gasparino profiles how risk became so integral to the U.S. and global market environment, condemning the unchecked proliferation of unstable and ill-considered derivative packages that led to disaster. Eventually recounting the fire sale of Bear Stearns and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Gasparino concludes that while Wall Street does employ financial thinkers “who [have] principles and who [refuse] to sell out…they [are] clearly outnumbered.”
Not Just the Facts, Ma’am
The moral shared by writer, professor, and former trader Pablo Triana’s Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets? may fly in the face of a business world that relies extensively on complex charts, statistics, modeling, and highly paid analysts and consultants. Triana’s central complaint is that even qualified financial thinkers and movers have been sidelined—and to some extent incapacitated—by an over-reliance on data. Triana holds real-world experience in far greater esteem than he does “theoretical know-how,” and his book is a call to arms for financiers to take advantage of the current lapse in market activity to push the quants to the margins rather than allow them to dominate future decision-making.
Chronicling the Bear Market
Serving as a literary tombstone for a fallen giant, William D. Cohan’s House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street has a similar goal as the Sorkin and Gasparino books, though of a more specific nature, as it focuses on Bear Stearns, from its origins to its messy downfall in March 2008. Cohan guides the reader through the epic path carved by Bear Stearns’ colorful leaders throughout the firm’s 85-year history with both detail and respect for the wide-ranging effects that the company’s practices had on the financial industry as a whole. More than just a portent of disasters to come, the fall of Bear Stearns was the fall of a legend, and there is no more fitting record of its once-mighty position than Cohan’s worthy documentation.
Iconography
David Magee’s Jeff Immelt and the New GE Way: Innovation, Transformation, and Winning in the 21st Century, though certainly a profile of its titular subject, is more than just a biography. Contained within the veteran business writer’s thorough look at General Electric’s impossibly charged successor to Jack Welch is an examination of just how brilliant leaders inspire every single one of the employees who labor beneath and alongside them. Immelt’s three core principles—integrity, performance, and change—are universal in their application; executives and directors from all industries can certainly find something of value in this book to help address their own leadership challenges.
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