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

Geithner had for years warned that the explosive growth in credit derivatives—various forms of insurance that investors could buy to protect themselves against the default of a trading partner—could actually make them ultimately more vulnerable, not less, because of the potential for a domino effect of defaults. The boom on Wall Street could not last, he repeatedly insisted, and the necessary precautions should be taken. He had stressed these ideas time and again in speeches he had delivered, but had anyone listened? The truth was, no one outside the financial world was particularly concerned with what the president of the New York Fed had to say. It was all Greenspan, Greenspan, Greenspan before it became Bernanke, Bernanke, Bernanke.