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

by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Walsh had virtually unlimited use of Lehman’s balance sheet and used it to turn the firm into an all-in, unhedged play on the U.S. real estate market, a giant REIT (real estate investment trust) with a little investment bank attached—a strategy that worked extraordinarily well right up until the moment that it didn’t.