This is an in-depth play-by-play of the 2008 financial crisis in the US from the perspective of the executives and the Treasury and Fed officials involved. It feels exhaustive in its coverage of the individuals involved even if it really isn’t, as that would require a much longer book. Reading it this long after is interesting and I do suspect I would have liked it more had I read it in 2009.

I am Canadian. I had only started working full time a few years prior to 2008 and very little savings. In Canada, for a number of reasons, we did not have a banking crisis in 2008. I did not lose my job and I don’t know anyone who did lose a job as a direct result of the crisis despite working in a real estate- and finance-adjacent industry at the time. My little savings were partially affected by the crisis as they were invested, in part, in mutual funds that invested in American stocks, but I made back that money pretty quickly.

But, despite how little direct impact it had on me, I was fascinated. I read every article I could, I learned what credit default swaps and CDOs were and, once the documentaries started appearing, I started watching as many as I could. But that was a long time ago. One thing I wish Sorkin did is explain, or have someone explain, what the financial exotica/arcana are, because it’s been well over a decade and I don’t remember any more. I think the biggest criticism of this book is that it mostly avoids any attempt at explaining the why and sticks to the who, what, where and when. (There is some attempt in the Epilogue to deal with the why and the aftermath of TARP.) Maybe that’s what Sorkin thought his role was, after all he’s a reporter, not an analyst. But, all these years later, it did feel like something was missing in terms of understanding what happened.

That being said, as a portrait of the who, what, where and when of the US part of the crisis, it’s probably hard to be. It feels exhaustively researched and the details feel personal and real. (As Zach Lowe said on a recent episode of his podcast, sometimes little details take 3 or more sources to nail down so there’s a lot of work there.) And one advantage of avoiding the analysis is it does help us get a sense of how at sea so many of these executives were when everything started to come crashing down. It’s easier to understand how little grasp some people had when the reader doesn’t fully grasp it all either.

I have no idea how I would feel about TARP today as a US citizen. I would have probably been outraged in 2008-09 even while trying to understand the need for it. One thing this book doesn’t really deal with in any great depth is whether or not TARP was the right solution, though it does come down on one side of that question. I do think that’s both an issue with a book like this but also not really the point. And one of the points that it makes more strongly, and both subtly and explicitly, which I do like and which I think is extremely important is how these companies were “too big to manage” – nobody seems to have known everything. And a further question is: “Could any one person at any of these banks have known the full degree of risk?” It’s concerning that we’re at a point in time in human history where private institutions are so large that they could be too big to manage.

Sorkin does explicitly argue, I believe in the recent Afterword, that this all calls for more thought and regulation when it comes to the financialization of everything. As a Canadian, that is a point that rings true to me. Yeah, we don’t have the financial innovation of the UK and the US but we don’t really have these crises. There may be something here we’re doing right. (Of course, we’re also not growing right now…) To the extent that I know anything at all about the economy, I don’t think this is something that has been fixed, if anything the abstractions between real products and services and the bets being made on them is arguably even more widespread than it was in the lead up to this crisis. Which is…concerning.

Overall, I am very glad I read this and I think it’s very good for what it is. But I also do feel like I need to read an analysis of the crisis or TARP or both to supplement it. But I’m sure I’ll have forgotten most of this book before I get there.

8/10