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

More than a quarter of the bailout funds left AIG immediately and went directly into the accounts of global financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank, which were owed the money under the credit default swaps that AIG had sold them and through their participation in its securities lending program. To some extent this disbursement only bolstered the argument of critics who decried Paulson’s rescue as a bailout by Wall Street for Wall Street. (It didn’t help that foreign banks received some of the indirect aid, even though foreign governments hadn’t contributed to the rescue plan.)