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

Those circumstances, Geithner told the committee, were not unlike those of 1907, or the Great Depression, and he went on to draw a straight line between panic on Wall Street and the economic health of the country: “Absent a forceful policy response, the consequences would be lower incomes for working families; higher borrowing costs for housing, education, and the expenses of everyday life; lower value of retirement savings; and rising unemployment.” So they’d done what they had to do for the good of the entire country, if not the world, as Steel explained. And thanks to their efforts, he confidently told the lawmakers, the hole in the dike had been plugged.