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

One of the great myths regarding the financial crisis is that the CEOs of the financial industry saw it coming—and still took on risk, confident that they would be bailed out because their firms were so large and important. Essentially, that is the very concept of “too big to fail.” But to truly give credence to the theory of “too big to fail,” one would have to believe that the executives who took on so much risk and leverage, beginning in 2004 by buying up subprime loans, genuinely knew both that they were doing something so dangerous that it would imperil the banking system, and that, even if they failed, the government would save them. Not one person I’ve interviewed prior to the publication of this book in 2009 or since has ever described a meeting or conversation that even hinted at reliance on government intervention.