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

Lehman Brothers was leveraged 30.7 to 1; Merrill Lynch was only slightly better, at 26.9 to 1. Paulson knew intuitively that Wall Street’s leverage problem could not end well. He also knew that the firms would never rein themselves in; they were all blindly chasing one another.