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slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
This was a well researched and detailed account of the near collapse of the financial market. I'm not in finance, so there were some parts of the book that I found dry, but overall Sorkin did a good job of making the information accessible to a layperson like me.
This is a very interesting yet not too heavy feeling book about the financial crisis. They humanize it quite nicely. It is too physically heavy. HATE huge hard backs!
Almost exactly 2 years later. Still pretty good. Still, I think, gives the perpetrators a lot of credit.
I didn’t know that this was the book I was looking for, but it was and I loved it. I should mention that I don’t think this book is for everyone – if you are only vaguely interested in the financial crisis, or if you liked the movie The Big Short and are exploring the bookish options, then this is not the book I’d suggest for you. If you read The Big Short and want to know what exactly was happening in the board rooms during the Lehman Brother collapse, then I highly suggest you pick this up.
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin begins with the collapse of Bear Sterns, and follows through to the development/implementation of the TARP program. We are invited into the board rooms and onto the conference calls of the leaders of the largest financial institutions as they attempt to solve the financial crisis they have found themselves in the middle of. This allows us to see the thought process behind each decision, as well as the consequences of those decisions. This cause/effect presentation enables the reader to glimpse how interconnected each institution was, and how the choices of one impacted the other. We are also given the viewpoint of the U.S. Treasury and U.S. Fed as they try to get a handle on the situation, with the additional (and unenviable) task of explaining these complex issues to a Congress and a nation who are demanding answers.
Again, I didn’t know that this was the book I was looking for, but being able to see what each C.E.O. was actually doing and thinking cleared up many of the questions I had after reading other books about the crisis. We see glimpses of how Congress was reacting to the issues, as well as the complexities of the deals and mergers that should have taken months if not years to complete, but that lawyers were scrambling to accomplish in mere hours. The frantic efforts taken by each person and organization are discussed, and though hindsight is 20/20, seeing the problems through the eyes of individuals in the moment was enlightening. If you are interested in the topic I would definitely consider this a must-read.
I listened to this on audiobook over a cross-country car ride. In general, I don’t know that I’d recommend this in audio format because names and titles are thrown out regularly and it can be difficult to keep track of them. Also, I was able to listen to this book multiple hours a day, but I think if you broke this up over a daily commute, it would be very easy to get confused about what exactly was happening. In text format, I don’t know if this would have been an issue, but in the audiobook it would have been helpful for all of the names of individuals to be included with the company they worked for (this is regularly done in the beginning of the book, but less consistent later in the text which is relevant because we are talking about different organizations at each point of the book, so the same people are not always mentioned throughout).
Note: There is a movie version of this, but it was terrible! I usually enjoy book/movie adaptations, but this adaptation was haphazard and rushed, making the movie unnecessarily confusing. The cast was fantastic, but the script was all over the place, and seemed to have been written by someone who had only read the cliff-notes version of the book.
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin begins with the collapse of Bear Sterns, and follows through to the development/implementation of the TARP program. We are invited into the board rooms and onto the conference calls of the leaders of the largest financial institutions as they attempt to solve the financial crisis they have found themselves in the middle of. This allows us to see the thought process behind each decision, as well as the consequences of those decisions. This cause/effect presentation enables the reader to glimpse how interconnected each institution was, and how the choices of one impacted the other. We are also given the viewpoint of the U.S. Treasury and U.S. Fed as they try to get a handle on the situation, with the additional (and unenviable) task of explaining these complex issues to a Congress and a nation who are demanding answers.
Again, I didn’t know that this was the book I was looking for, but being able to see what each C.E.O. was actually doing and thinking cleared up many of the questions I had after reading other books about the crisis. We see glimpses of how Congress was reacting to the issues, as well as the complexities of the deals and mergers that should have taken months if not years to complete, but that lawyers were scrambling to accomplish in mere hours. The frantic efforts taken by each person and organization are discussed, and though hindsight is 20/20, seeing the problems through the eyes of individuals in the moment was enlightening. If you are interested in the topic I would definitely consider this a must-read.
I listened to this on audiobook over a cross-country car ride. In general, I don’t know that I’d recommend this in audio format because names and titles are thrown out regularly and it can be difficult to keep track of them. Also, I was able to listen to this book multiple hours a day, but I think if you broke this up over a daily commute, it would be very easy to get confused about what exactly was happening. In text format, I don’t know if this would have been an issue, but in the audiobook it would have been helpful for all of the names of individuals to be included with the company they worked for (this is regularly done in the beginning of the book, but less consistent later in the text which is relevant because we are talking about different organizations at each point of the book, so the same people are not always mentioned throughout).
Note: There is a movie version of this, but it was terrible! I usually enjoy book/movie adaptations, but this adaptation was haphazard and rushed, making the movie unnecessarily confusing. The cast was fantastic, but the script was all over the place, and seemed to have been written by someone who had only read the cliff-notes version of the book.
informative
tense
medium-paced
2020 reading challenge category: A book on a topic you know nothing about (the 2008 financial crisis)
A readable account of the 2008 financial crisis, even for those who have very little background knowledge about the situation. This is a people-based account rather than a numbers-based one, and sometimes the people are hard to keep track of, particularly when some of them are moving between agencies or companies. I would recommend ignoring the "cast of characters" at the beginning as some of the people are pretty irrelevant. For example, Hilary Clinton is listed, but the extent of her involvement is basically discussing swapping speaking positions at an engagement with someone actually involved in the crisis.
Also, this book needs some more copy editing. Missing or misplace quotation marks and commas abound, and in at least two instances a sentence is repeated verbatim in the next line or paragraph. But still, very informative!
A readable account of the 2008 financial crisis, even for those who have very little background knowledge about the situation. This is a people-based account rather than a numbers-based one, and sometimes the people are hard to keep track of, particularly when some of them are moving between agencies or companies. I would recommend ignoring the "cast of characters" at the beginning as some of the people are pretty irrelevant. For example, Hilary Clinton is listed, but the extent of her involvement is basically discussing swapping speaking positions at an engagement with someone actually involved in the crisis.
Also, this book needs some more copy editing. Missing or misplace quotation marks and commas abound, and in at least two instances a sentence is repeated verbatim in the next line or paragraph. But still, very informative!