Pagina principaleGruppiConversazioniAltroStatistiche
Cerca nel Sito
Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.

Risultati da Google Ricerca Libri

Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.

Sto caricando le informazioni...

Too big to fail. I retroscena: come Wall Street e Washington hanno cercato di salvare il sistema finanziario e se stessi. (2009)

di Andrew Ross Sorkin

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1,776489,585 (3.87)39
Presents a moment-by-moment account of the recent financial collapse that documents state efforts to prevent an economic disaster, offering insight into the pivotal consequences of decisions made throughout the past decade.
Sto caricando le informazioni...

Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro.

Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.

» Vedi le 39 citazioni

This is the story of how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Federal Reserve tried but failed to head off the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 as told in the voices of the principal players. Just after I read this book I began reading Lords of Finance, a similar tale about the failure of the national bankers in the 1920's to head of the crash of '29. Both stories have a similar ring: the adults come in to restore order after the children get out of hand, but the "adults" in both cases underestimate the power of events and overestimate their authority. In 2008 the institutions underestimated the amount of so-called risk in the system because they could not control the financial commitments the players had made, to the tune of trillions of dollars. In the 20's, bank regulators could not control the volume of credit flowing into the US stock market from foreign sources. What does this mean? And is there any similarity to the current threat of sovereign default in the European system? If money is not the promise of something being there when a debt is called, what is the nature of money, paper or otherwise? Here we have the dilemma of modern finance: when people and governments promise wealth or social security nets it is really not the promise of something that is real, but something that is wished for, not so unlike a gambling casino. We try to set up toll booths to regulate the promise-making machines, bank regulators, government auditors, credit-rating agencies, and the like, but the institutions cannot protect us against our fantasies getting ahead of reality. That we overcommit ourselves and our institutions is not so bad, after all, because optimism is a constituent of human nature it seems. Greed likewise is hard-wired into us. It greases the wheels of commerce. I'd hate to think of a world where we were not optimists. My business would certainly fail, so would many others. I'm not seeing any grand solutions in these books, but I sure am getting a dose of reality. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
I always used to say that life was too short for bad movies or cheap beer, but with books I had an ironclad and perhaps foolish rule: you make a commitment to read it all the way to the end. Not so with Too Big to Fail; for once (okay, twice), I broke that promise.

I've been working in financial services for over two years now, and was then employed for a company that went down spectacularly in flames during the crash. It was important for me to read something that tried to make sense of the Wall Street chaos.

This isn't that book. There's only the most cursory discussion of credit-default swaps, for instance -- for explanations, NPR's Planet Money, or The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, does a far better job -- and for all of Sorkin's attention to detail throughout, one doesn't get a good sense of how everything is connected.

The book is also terribly formulaic. By the third chapter or so the schema is set: introduce yet another person, describe their backgrounds (disappointingly uniform, I must say), add some detail about their culinary habits or the car they drive or The Moment They Received the Fateful Phone call, then move on to the next COO (either the one about to be replaced, or the replacement). With a cast of characters as long as a business account's legal disclosure, it isn't immediately clear why each one is relevant other than the fact that they spoke to Sorkin for the record.

Sorkin has a good handle on what creates tension within a scene, but there's no disguising the fact that most of the action takes place in boardrooms and offices. (If this were a film, we'd at least get an unconvincing montage of people staring at computer screens to gussy up the action, but there's no opportunity for that here.)

What kept me doggedly reading the next few chapters after that wasn't some narrative hook, ultimately, but the nagging, guilty, post-crash feeling of frugality that I spent good money on this, and that I could at least squeeze a few more minutes of entertainment out of it. But "life is short" won the day. ( )
  thewilyf | Dec 25, 2023 |
There are few people alive today that experienced the onset of the Great Depression nor seeing reactions in real time or the in-depth analysis of financiers, pundits, government officials, and politicians however that isn’t the case for the beginning of the Great Recession. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin that provides an overview of the 2007-8 financial crisis from the aftermath of the sale of Bear Stearns to the creation of TARP.

The main figures throughout the book are Treasury Secretary Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson and his staff, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Tim Geithner though throughout the first half of the book the major secondary figure was Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. While Sorkin covers all the threads of the slowly deteriorating of the economic environment, it’s Fuld and Lehman Brothers that is focus due to their bankruptcy leading to one of---if the most---tumultuous weeks on Wall Street, in Washington, and around the world in financial history. Let’s be clear, there are no heroes presented just people finding their worldviews getting a serious reality check as they stare into the abyss. Through Fuld is in no way a sympathetic individual, Sorkin’s writing does make him a tragic figure whose efforts to save his company were at times undermined by his own brash bravado to the point that in the end his subordinates cut him out of the increasingly futile efforts to save the company. Though originally written and published a little over a year after the dark days of September and October 2008, there is some fuzziness on the state of the world then when viewed 15 years later and the afterworld written for this 10th anniversary edition only shows a little of the long-term effects and aftershocks that are affecting the world today.

Too Big to Fail chronicles the inside story of how the financial system imploded even as Wall Street and Washington struggled to save it. Andrew Ross Sorkin portrays the situation in understandable terms and presents the participants as people struggling against a situation that undermines their preconceived notions without prejudice or favor. ( )
  mattries37315 | Mar 26, 2023 |
Pretty gripping, almost thriller-ish. Made me appreciate the hard work of the Feds though I don't feel much better about the bankers who got us into the mess and still haven't paid a price for it. ( )
  squealermusic | Mar 16, 2023 |
“At its core Too Big to Fail is a chronicle of failure - a failure that brought the world to its knees and raised questions about the very nature of capitalism. It is an intimate portrait of the dedicated and often baffled individuals who struggled… to spare the world and themselves an even more calamitous outcome. It would be comforting to say that all the characters depicted in this book were able to cast aside their own concerns… and join together to prevent the worse from happening. But as you’ll see, in making their decisions, they were not immune to the fierce rivalries and power grabs that are part of the long-established cultures on Wall Street and in Washington. In the end this drama is a human one, a tale about the fallibility of people who thought they themselves were too big to fail.”

This book follows the key people and businesses involved in the 2008 Financial Crisis. It goes into the details of conversations, conference calls, executive-level meetings, deals that almost took place, and who said what. It documents the sequence of events from the time of the initial warning bells, the fall of Bear Stearns, and ends with the “bailout” and its immediate aftermath. It takes the reader behind the scenes of the financial markets and is based upon hundreds of interviews. Published in 2009, it does not analyze the reasons behind the collapse, other than at a very high level.

The author focuses in on Lehman Brothers and, to a lesser extent, on American International Group (AIG) as the centerpiece of the narrative. There is a very large cast of characters (a helpful list is provided), which can occasionally be a bit overwhelming, but overall, I found it an easy-to-follow, page-turning chronicle. Sorkin sticks to the facts with little editorializing. It contains plenty of business and financial jargon and could have benefited from a bit more explanation for those not fully versed in these topics. It is a lengthy book (over 600 pages) and I think a few details (such as who drinks what types of beverages), could have been eliminated and not lost any of the important information. Recommended to anyone with a desire to understand the chain of events during the Financial Crisis. ( )
  Castlelass | Feb 9, 2023 |
Andrew Ross Sorkin's blow-by-blow account of the unfolding of events in the US, when financial titans up to and including Goldman Sachs were days, or even hours, away from running out of liquidity, gives a handy dramatis personae of those inhabiting Wall Street's Jurassic Park, in the manner of a compendious Russian novel
aggiunto da mikeg2 | modificaThe Guardian, Ruth Sunderland (Dec 13, 2009)
 
Sorkin’s prodigious reporting and lively writing put the reader in the room for some of the biggest-dollar conference calls in history. It’s an entertaining, brisk book.
 

» Aggiungi altri autori

Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Andrew Ross Sorkinautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Hughes, WilliamNarratoreautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Devi effettuare l'accesso per contribuire alle Informazioni generali.
Per maggiori spiegazioni, vedi la pagina di aiuto delle informazioni generali.
Titolo canonico
Titolo originale
Titoli alternativi
Data della prima edizione
Personaggi
Luoghi significativi
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Eventi significativi
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Film correlati
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Epigrafe
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Size, we are told, is not a crime. But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it was attained or the uses to which it is put. - Louis Brandeis
Dedica
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
To my parents, Joan and Larry, and my loving wife, Pilar
Incipit
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Prologue: Standing in the kitchen of his Park Avenue apartment, Jamie Dimon poured himself a cup of coffee, hoping it might ease his headache.
Chapter One: The morning air was frigid in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Citazioni
Ultime parole
Nota di disambiguazione
Redattore editoriale
Elogi
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi. Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Lingua originale
DDC/MDS Canonico
LCC canonico

Risorse esterne che parlano di questo libro

Wikipedia in inglese (6)

Presents a moment-by-moment account of the recent financial collapse that documents state efforts to prevent an economic disaster, offering insight into the pivotal consequences of decisions made throughout the past decade.

Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche

Descrizione del libro
Riassunto haiku

Discussioni correnti

Nessuno

Copertine popolari

Link rapidi

Voto

Media: (3.87)
0.5 1
1 4
1.5 1
2 16
2.5 3
3 63
3.5 7
4 128
4.5 16
5 72

Sei tu?

Diventa un autore di LibraryThing.

Penguin Australia

Una edizione di quest'opera è stata pubblicata da Penguin Australia.

» Pagina di informazioni sull'editore

 

A proposito di | Contatto | LibraryThing.com | Privacy/Condizioni d'uso | Guida/FAQ | Blog | Negozio | APIs | TinyCat | Biblioteche di personaggi celebri | Recensori in anteprima | Informazioni generali | 203,243,531 libri! | Barra superiore: Sempre visibile