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

In the past decade, nationalism, with its focus on looking inward and its antipathy toward outsiders, has become a popular refrain—a remarkable shift in attitude from pre-crisis days and another example of the crisis’s global ripples so many years later. The United States, once a symbol of open borders and trading, has become engaged in debates about imposing tariffs and building walls. Perhaps the best example of the decline in trust in governments around the world was the creation of Bitcoin, a new form of currency known as a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is not tied to any central banks such as the Federal Reserve, but is a peer-to-peer system without any governing body to decide its rules or fate. The founder of Bitcoin, a mysterious individual (or group of individuals, since its origin is still not known for certain) named Satoshi Nakamoto, explained the justification for its creation in a paper posted to the Internet: The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.