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

A great deal of money can be made from derivatives, which are, in simplest terms, financial instruments that are based on some underlying asset, such as residential mortgages, to weather conditions. Like the bomb that ended the film Dr. Strangelove, derivatives could, and did, blow up; Warren Buffett called them weapons of mass destruction.