Too Big to Fail

The Saturday Morning Phone Call

It is seven o'clock in the morning on Saturday, September 13, 2008, and Jamie Dimon — chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, the third-largest bank in America — is standing in his Park Avenue kitchen nursing a hangover. The night before, he had been across town at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with about a dozen rival Wall Street CEOs, brainstorming a private rescue of Lehman Brothers. By Sunday night, Lehman would be a corpse. Within a week, Merrill Lynch would be swallowed by Bank of America, AIG would be ninety days from a federal seizure, and the last two independent investment banks in the country would beg to be turned into something they had spent decades despising: ordinary commercial banks.

At seven thirty Dimon dials two dozen members of his management team. "You are about to experience the most unbelievable week in America ever," he tells them, "and we have to prepare for the absolutely worst case." Then he pauses, and reads a list. Lehman. Merrill Lynch. AIG. Morgan Stanley. Goldman Sachs. Five firms, all filing.

There was, Sorkin writes, a collective gasp on the phone.

That gasp is the spine of Andrew Ross Sorkin's *Too Big to Fail*. The book covers about six months, March through October 2008, but it is really about a question that has nothing to do with derivatives: how a small number of unbelievably powerful men, most of whom had known each other for decades, made decisions in conference rooms and on cell phones and over plastic bottles of Diet Coke that determined whether the global financial system would survive the weekend. Sorkin had access that almost nobody else had. He talked to virtually everyone in the room. The book reads like a thriller because, for those months, the people inside it were living inside one.