From a UK perspective, there are fascinating insights into less than flattering US views of us. John Varley, the intelligent and decent boss of Barclays, is dismissed by Paulson as a “waffler” and a “weak man.” Paulson declared the British had “grin-fucked us” after the chancellor and the Financial Services Authority, the City of London regulator, declined to allow Barclays to take over Lehmans on the grounds it was too risky — meaning we did the dirty on the Americans while smiling to their faces.
A clue to the difficulty politicians had in dealing with the crisis is in the very small gene pool shared by the two worlds. Dubya’s brother Jeb worked as an adviser to Lehmans’ private equity arm and his second cousin George H. Walker IV was on the executive committee. Hank Paulson’s brother Richard also worked for the firm; as a former employee of Goldman Sachs, Paulson was tied up in knots over his subsequent dealings with his former employer.
So is Too Big to Fail the best book about the crisis? For my money, Fool’s Gold by Gillian Tett is a more sophisticated read; from a UK perspective, Alex Brummer’s The Crunch is more engaging; and Graham Turner’s No Way to Run an Economy is more provocative. But Sorkin has provided an entertaining addition to the crunch-lit genre. Its final message is a worrying one. Unlike the dinosaurs on the cover, the Wall Street raptors are far from extinct, despite their greed and folly; those who remain are doing better than ever. “Perhaps most disturbing of all, ego is still very much a central part of the Wall Street machine,” Sorkin says, noting that the survivors have been left with a genuine sense of invulnerability. Jurassic Park may be less populous, but how long before the sequel?
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