The inside story

Amazon lists 3,465 books about the credit crunch. But only one gives a minute-by-minute account of the key characters, the shouting, the text messages and the furious meetings. Andrew Ross Sorkin, chief mergers and acquisitions reporter at The New York Times, has written that book — a book where you relive the process, tiny detail by tiny detail.

In Too Big To Fail we witness Lehman Brothers chief executive Dick Fuld rolling the trackball on his BlackBerry like a string of worry beads and recoil as AIG chief Robert Willumstad feels the perspiration soak through his vest on the way to a meeting with then president of the Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner. The book has all the drama of a Hollywood film but none of the heroes.

Sorkin insists he uses no artistic licence. All the intimate details were gathered in hundreds of interviews with some of the most important players in the global financial markets. "I ask the most tedious questions that you could ever ask anybody," he says. Certain people became frustrated because they thought they were stupid or petty questions. But overall his sources were incredibly helpful.

History in the making

"I think all of them had a sense that this was history and they wanted to help reconstruct the record," Sorkin says. Others had different motives for taking part. "There were people who clearly were in it for themselves. They wanted to reconstruct their legacy, resurrect their legacy, spin their legacy in some other way." Then there were those who did not want to participate at all but felt compelled to out of fear. Sorkin is coy about his sources but, from the facts he gleaned, it is clear his enquiries took him right to the top.

At just 32, Sorkin has come very far, very quickly. The book's press release trumpets that he wrote his first article for The New York Times before he left high school. By the time he graduated from college he had 71 articles published in the paper. A former colleague is full of praise. "He's very ambitious, he's got a lot of initiative, he also is tireless in getting things done." Other journalists dispute this glowing report. Rivals say his father had connections at the paper and that is how he managed to crowbar his way into a job at such a young age. His father did indeed have a connection at the paper, which he tried to exploit. But his request was rejected. "The guy who rejected me still likes to tell that," he laughs.

Much of the sniping is no doubt born of jealousy; you do not rise as fast as Sorkin without making enemies. But perhaps the strongest criticism thrown his way is that he has become an apologist for the perpetrators of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Sorkin insists that with Too Big To Fail he was simply out to record events as they happened. "My goal really wasn't to say to the reader, ‘This is a good guy, this is a bad guy'. My goal was to put you inside the room so that you could make your own choice." But he concedes that "perhaps by default when you humanise someone, you actually get to see them as a person, you can sympathise with them".

Even after the event, Sorkin is unwilling to cast any of the characters as villains. Mack's reputation was saved when the Japanese struck an eleventh-hour deal to rescue Morgan Stanley. If that had not come through, Sorkin says, we could have been talking about him in the same breath as Fuld, who is reviled for his part in the collapse of Lehman Brothers. "Or we could have been talking about [Citigroup's] Vikram Pandit in the same breath. It's not that I'm loath to cast one as good or bad, it's that probably all in their own way would have turned bad had the government not stepped in." He says there is little understanding of this among the rich and powerful. "If you spend time with the really senior leaders on Wall Street today who are still in a position of power relative to where they were last year, they think of themselves as survivors. That's the word they use, like a cancer survivor. I'm not sure there's an appreciation that they were rescued by the government and I'm not sure there's an appreciation that they brought the system to the brink."

Unchanged ethos

As chief M&A reporter, Sorkin chose a good time to take a nine-month hiatus to write the book. Now the deals are back on, he has returned to Wall Street, tramping his beat for the latest on Warren Buffett's railways deal and the like. He says, worryingly, that little has changed. "We have not reverted to old, traditional banking. Most of these profits come from taking on risk. And so arguably the ethos has not changed, the sort of ‘Greed is good', Gordon Gecko tagline."

Sorkin says it is getting gradually less likely that any new legislation governing the banks will be passed as a result of the credit crisis, in part because many of the key players on Wall Street and in Washington have stayed the same. "People who were on the scene of the crime last year are still on the police force."

The process is not helped by the apparent recovery in the stock markets. "The farther we get away from the crisis and the better it seems the economy is, the harder and harder it is to get any type of meaningful regulation at all."

Perhaps in a bid to charm while promoting his book in the United Kingdom, Sorkin says the British have led the United States in their thinking with regard to the bailouts and regulatory reform throughout the process. Having worked for the London bureau of The New York Times in the late 1990s, he says: "I think that there is a sense in the UK that you can be much more outspoken here and ruffling feathers is not considered a bad thing. In the US that is not always the case, so people are less inclined to go out on a limb, even the politicians." He pauses, before adding: "I'm sure that my friends in the US would not like me saying this."