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

Despite whatever perceived lack of trust or confidence the public had in government, the U.S. economy demonstrably did rebound. It may still be popular to deride the bailouts, but the steps that Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner took in the depths of the crisis empirically worked, even more than the most optimistic prognosticators had forecast. “If we were back in early 2009—when we were coming to work every morning with clenched stomachs, with the economy losing 800,000 jobs a month and the Dow under 7,000—and someone said that by your last year in office, unemployment would be five percent, the deficit would be under three percent, AIG would have turned a profit and we made all our money back on the banks, that would’ve been beyond anybody’s wildest expectations,” Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, observed. Today, Geithner says that the bank bailouts, as successful as they were, could never be fully appreciated. “It looks like you’re giving aid to the arsonist. Inherent in successful economic rescues are things that are deeply unpopular. And, of course, I knew that, felt that was unavoidable, lamentable.” President Obama blamed his messaging for one of the reasons the public didn’t recognize the significance of the economic rebound, suggesting that he had resisted telling the public the truth about how terrible the crisis had actually been. “It was a delicate balance throughout 2009 and 2010,” he explained, “to be st...