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

Claude Trichet told the audience that they needed to come up with common requirements for capital ratios—the amount of money a firm needed to keep on hand compared to the amount it could lend—and, more important, leverage and liquidity standards, which he thought were much more telling indicators of a firm’s ability to withstand a “run on the bank.”