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

Directly in the middle of the story was a quote, citing two people who had been briefed on merger talks between Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, saying that John Mack had told Vikram Pandit, “We need a merger or we’re not going to make it.” Nides couldn’t believe Mack even said that. He had been in the room for one of the calls with Pandit and it didn’t go like that, he thought. Morgan Stanley, Nides knew, could not afford that sort of coverage, whether or not it was true. The more people who knew it, the truer it would become. “Did you see this irresponsible piece of shit in the Times?” Nides asked when he got Mack on the phone. Mack, however, only read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Post, having canceled his Times subscription in protest after the Sulzberger family pulled its money from Morgan Stanley because one of its asset managers had decided to run a proxy contest against the Times ownership.