In January 1989, U.S. President Ronald Reagan issued his “Farewell Address to the Nation” from the Oval Office. And that's about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
“John Cotton is forty-six years old. He is the most respected, famous, and beloved Puritan minister in England. Getting him to bless the send-off of these relatively unimportant castaways would be like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid's eighth-grade graduation. In fact, once the colonists arrive in Massachusetts they will name their settlement Boston, in honor of Cotton's hometown.”
In November 2008, Virginia Heffernan wrote “Mayflower Power” for The New York Times. Sarah Vowell is a problem. She’s a problem like Sarah Palin, Cyndi Lauper and Kathy Griffin. She’s annoying. Or, really, she’s double-annoying, because she styles herself as annoying — provocative-annoying — and if you become annoyed by her you seem to be conceding the point. She’s gotten to you. Vowell, who constantly emphasizes how nerdy (meaning impressive) she finds her own interest in the Puritans, introduces figures like John Winthrop and Roger Williams as if no one’s ever heard of them. She delivers a farrago of free-floating pedantry — “the kind of smart-alecky diatribe for which I’ve gotten paid for 20 years” — having evidently made it her job to enlighten slacker Gen-Xers with a remedial history of our own nation. It’s not right. Vowell’s whole alt-everything vibe is just dated enough to be cringey. And then there’s her Great Plains accent: can something so wholesome-soundin’ be real? And her politics. Perfectly early-millennium coastal (green, be good, Obama, etc.). Can she really take pleasure in plumping for an autofill ideology that’s so widely shared?
“Is the glass half empty or half full?” is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full) or pessimism (half empty); or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble. This idiom is used to explain how people perceive events and objects. Perception is unique to every individual and is simply one's interpretation of reality. The phrase "Is the glass half empty or half full" can be referred to as a philosophical question.
“I do tend to be an anxious fellow and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news. I appreciate honesty. I appreciate confronting something head on and being given all the details first — and then responding to them in whatever way I might. At best, it simply confirmed who I am to myself. It helps me. For me, it works.”
In September 2010, Bill Scheft wrote “Nabob of Negativism” for The New York Times. The book jacket of “Half Empty,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.
“Writer Melissa Bank said it best: 'The only proper answer to 'Why me?' is 'Why not you?' The universe is anarchic and doesn't care about us and unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask. And in so many other ways, I'm so far ahead of the game. I have access to great medical care. My general baseline health, aside from the general unpleasantness of the cancer, is great. And it's great because I'm privileged to have great health. And I live in a country where I'm not making sneakers for a living and I don't live near a toxic waste dump. You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.”
The MMR vaccine controversy refers to claims that autism spectrum disorders are a direct result to having the MMR vaccine administered. MMR is an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism surfaced in a 1998 paper, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical guidelines and codes. The Lancet retracted the, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010, and was struck off the Medical Register—meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the United Kingdom. In 2011, media circulated the news that the BMJ had declared the research about the MMR link to autism “fraudulent.”
"This type of cognitive relativism — or "truthiness," as fictional talk show host Stephen Colbert termed it — has become the defining intellectual trend of our time."
"It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all of the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."
- Seth Mnookin; April 2010, Larry King Live
"Looking at the diseases mumps, measles and rubella in a country like the US... it doesn't tend to be a problem. Children will do fine with these diseases in a developed country that has good nutrition. And because I live in a country where the norm is vaccine, I can delay my vaccines."
- Mother of a grade-schooler that was infected while on vacation in Europe
“By 2005 … a preoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditional institutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of ‘autism advocates’ as prerequisites for membership in their community.”
In January 2011, David M. Shribman wrote “Anatomy of a panic” for the Boston Globe. In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of some of the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book, Feeding the Monster,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.
"That MMR paper is the best example there has ever been of a very, very dodgy paper that has created a lot of discomfort and misery."
- Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's MMR-autism research
"Anxiety about the individual's fate in industrialized societies [plays a role in motivating anti-vaccination crusaders]. Then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control. [...] Then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor."
January 2011: Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus" is a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. But the story starts with a bit of bad science. On Feb. 26, 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a paper by a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who claimed that he had found a causal link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Even though the journal's editors made it clear that further research was needed, at a press conference Dr. Wakefield announced: "With the debate over MMR that has started, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." […] In a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing, Seth Mnookin explains precisely how medical researchers set about determining whether there is a causal connection in an apparent pattern. "Broadly speaking, there are three ways scientists collect data to test new theories," he explains. "The best possible method is through a randomized clinical trial, in which researchers take a sampling of a population and arbitrarily test their hypothesis on one half while leaving the other half untouched."
From the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation, dated April 1, 2009: Jenny McCarthy is well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's getting far more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight. But that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous, well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) - the claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms begin to appear. The antivaccination movement has been directly linked with outbreaks of various vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The facts are in, and have been for quite some time: vaccines are an overwhelming modern medical success story, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox, and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza, and diptheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism as well. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy, so she wins the Pigasus award for her contribution to the country's ill-health.
In finance, short selling (also known as shorting or going short) is the practice of selling assets, usually securities, that have been borrowed from a third party (usually a broker) with the intention of buying identical assets back at a later date to return to the lender. It is a form of reverse trading. The short seller hopes to profit from a decline in the price of the assets between the sale and the repurchase, as the seller will pay less to buy the assets than the seller received on selling them. Conversely, the short seller will incur a loss if the price of the assets rises. Other costs of shorting may include a fee for borrowing the assets and payment of any dividends paid on the borrowed assets. "Shorting" and "going short" also refer to entering into any derivative or other contract under which the investor profits from a fall in the value of an asset. Going short can be contrasted with the more conventional practice of "going long", whereby an investor profits from any increase in the price of the asset.
“I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit. I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put sell ratings on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should.”
“The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: ‘The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.”
- Steve Eisman, on his time at Oppenheimer as a lead analyst.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a 2010 non-fiction book by Michael Lewis about the build-up of the housing and credit bubble during the 2000s. It describes several of the key players in the creation of the credit-default-swap (CDS) market that sought to bet against the bubble and thus ended up profiting from the financial crisis of 2007–2010. The Big Short also highlights the eccentric nature of the type of person who bets against the market or goes against the grain. The book follows people who believed the bubble was going to burst. The Michael Lewis book was shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. The The Big Short spent 28 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list for non-fiction.
"I felt like I am heading towards a short life. I have been pushed repeatedly to the brink by my own actions, the Fund’s investors, business partners, and even former employees. I have always been able to pull back and carry on my often overly intense affair with this business. Now, however, I am facing personal matters that have carried me irrefutably over the threshold, and I have come to the sullen realization that I must close down the Fund."
- Dr. Michael Burry in a final letter to Scion Capital Investors
Michael Burry was born in 1972. He is the founder of the Scion Capital LLC hedge fund. Burry ran the fund from 2000 to 2008, when he closed Scion for various reasons. Burry was one of the first investors to recognize and invest in the impending subprime mortgage crisis. Author Michael Lewis profiled him in his 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Burry was also featured in Gregory Zuckerman's 2009 book The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History. Michael Burry left work as a Stanford Hospital neurology resident to become a full-time investor and start his own hedge fund. He had already developed a reputation as an investor by demonstrating astounding success in "value investing," which he wrote about on a message board beginning in 1996. He was so successful with his stock picks that he attracted the interest of such companies as Vanguard and White Mountains Insurance Group, as well as prominent investors such as Joel Greenblatt. In November 2000, Michael Burry shut down his website and discontinued posting to the message board. He did this in order to focus completely and exclusively on launching Scion Capital, which he funded with a modest inheritance and various loans from family members. The company was named after The Scions of Shannara, a favorite childhood book. Burry quickly earned extraordinary profits for his investors.
"[In] his first full year, 2001, the S&P 500 fell 11.88 percent. Scion was up 55 percent. The next year, the S&P 500 fell again, by 22.1 percent, and yet Scion was up again: 16 percent. The next year, 2003, the stock market finally turned around and rose 28.69 percent, but Mike Burry beat it again—his investments rose by 50 percent. By the end of 2004, Mike Burry was managing $600 million and turning money away."
“I said to my mother, ‘I think we might be facing something like the end of democratic capitalism.’ And she just said, ‘Oh, Charlie,’ and seriously suggested I go on lithium.”
- Charles Ledley co-founder of Cornwall Capital Management
Cornwall Capital is a New York City based private financial investment corporation. Cornwall played a primary role in the story of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. The firm was one of a handful in the world that correctly foresaw and profited from the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. Charles Ledley and James Mai were 30 years old when they launched Cornwall Capital in a house garage in Berkeley, California. The fund was seeded with $110,000 from various relatives and family members. In the fund’s first 2 years, they had grown their capital from $110,000 to $15 million by shorting stocks and other investments that they believed were incorrectly valued due to the inability of the market to account for sudden and unexpected change. In other words, option prices (“strikes”) were set according to a stock or set of stocks’ historical data (past performance), and did not take into account unusual or "Black Swan" events that may occur in the future. By finding potential Black Swan events, Charles Ledley and James Mai were able to make stunning returns of 100:1 or greater in extremely short periods. Charles Ledley and James Mai pinpointed and shorted stocks and other financial instruments accordingly, correctly positioning Cornwall Capital against the subprime mortgage crisis before most other people saw the crash coming. Charles Ledley and James Mai have garnered some attention, largely due to the Michael Lewis book, The Big Short. In 2010, Cornwall Capital was estimated to be worth $200 to $300 million.
“They were stuffing the channel, getting as much shit out so that it could be rated by the old model.”
- Vincent Daniel, regarding the May 2006 announcement of Standard & Poor’s new model for rating subprime mortgage bonds
In March 2010, Andrew Leonard wrote “Bringing subprime sexy back” for Salon.com: If you wanted to summarize "The Big Short" in just one line, it might be: the most lucid explanation yet offered to readers as to the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime collateralized debt obligation. Which might not sound like a whole lot of fun, but turns out to be a blast. As someone who has struggled for years to penetrate the obtuse world of structured finance and the role it played in blowing up Wall Street, I must give credit where credit is due. "The Big Short" is superb: Michael Lewis doing what he does best, illuminating the idiocy, madness and greed of modern finance. Even though I have long been a huge Michael Lewis fan, dating all the way back to "Liar's Poker," his hilarious and enlightening account of life as a bond broker in the go-go '80s, I did not anticipate something this good, something capable of carrying its weight as a bookend to "Liar's Poker's" delights. My heart actually sank when the galleys of "The Big Short" arrived in the mail. A library of books exploring the financial crisis has already been published, with many, many more yet to come. My bedside table groans under the weight of their unfinished tomes. What could Michael Lewis have to say that hadn't already been said a million times over? But then I made the mistake of glancing at the first chapter and literally could not put "The Big Short" down. Michael Lewis achieves what I previously imagined impossible: He makes subprime sexy all over again. The secret to Lewis' success is a mixture of strategy and craft. Most books on the financial crisis find their locus inside the Wall Street firms at the heart of the action. The general theme: Hubristic banksters are oblivious to what they've wrought until it is too late. Chaos ensues. Michael Lewis takes a different tack. "The Big Short" tells the stories of an odd collection of brilliant misfits who recognize that Wall Street is wearing no clothes, become convinced a massive calamity is nigh, and seek feverishly to profit off of their understanding. They are, in Wall Street parlance, the "shorts" -- speculators who bet that the price of a given stock or bond or commodity or any derivative thereof will fall, rather than rise. Most shorts pick on a single company, or have a dour view of the direction of the price of corn or pork bellies. "The Big Short" is a little more ambitious: It's a bet on financial sector collapse.
"Too big to fail" is a term of art in regulation and public policy that refers to businesses dealing with market complications related to moral hazard, economic specialization, and monetary theory. Entities are considered to be "too big to fail" by those who believe those entities are so central to a macro-economy that their failure will be disastrous to an economy, and as such believe they should become recipients of beneficial financial and economic policies from governments and/or central banks. Companies that fall into this category take positions that are high-risk, as they are able to leverage these risks based on the policy preference they receive. The term has emerged as prominent in public discourse since the 2007–2010 global financial crisis. Some critics see the policy as counterproductive, i.e. those large banks or other institutions should fail if their risk management is not effective. Moreover, some assert that the "too big to fail" policy has been explicitly refuted in the People's Republic of China, with the bankruptcy of Guangdong International Trust & Investment Corporation in 1998. Some economists, such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman don't see it as necessarily a bad thing, with economy of scale in banks, as in other businesses, as worth preserving, so long as they are well regulated, in proportion to their economic clout.
"You shouldn't assume it's correct just because Goldman said it. My brother works at Goldman, and he's an idiot!"
- Joseph Cassano, the head of AIG's financial products unit told the firm's board of directors after being confronted with conflicting valuations from Goldman Sachs
"There aren't enough lifeboats. Someone is going to die. So you might as well enjoy the champagne and caviar!"
- Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, to his staff the night before Lehman filed for bankruptcy
The "Repo Market" - A Repurchase agreement, also known as a Repo or Sale and Repurchase Agreement, is the sale of securities together with an agreement for the seller to buy back the securities at a later date. The repurchase price will be greater than the original sale price, the difference effectively representing interest, sometimes called the repo rate. The party who originally buys the securities effectively acts as a lender. The original seller is effectively acting as a borrower, using their security as collateral for a secured cash loan at a fixed rate of interest. A repo is equivalent to a cash transaction combined with a forward contract. The cash transaction results in transfer of money to the borrower in exchange for legal transfer of the security to the lender, while the forward contract ensures repayment of the loan to the lender and return of the collateral of the borrower. The difference between the forward price and the spot price is effectively the interest on the loan while the settlement date of the forward contract is the maturity date of the loan.
Stanley Druckenmiller, a George Soros acolyte who's worth more than $3.5 billion, approached Goldman Sachs co-president Gary Cohn about withdrawing millions invested with the bank. “Look, the one thing I’m doing is I’m learning who my friends are and who my enemies are, and I’m making lists.” Cohn said. Druckenmiller replied, “I don’t really give a shit—it’s my money! It’s my livelihood. I’ve got to protect myself, and I don’t really give a shit what you have to say.”
In November, 2009, at around the publishing of the Andrew Ross Sorkin book, Too Big to Fail, Gabriel Sherman wrote "The Information Broker" for New York magazine, about how Andrew Ross Sorkin, himself, is "too big to fail" in the eyes of the company that he works for: For journalists, bad news can be good news. And so, in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse last September, as the world’s economy teetered, an all-star roster of business journalists—Roger Lowenstein, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean—raced to shop book proposals to chronicle the epochal events unfolding on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. On the morning of September 23, 2008, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times’ then-31-year-old star financial reporter, made the rounds to publishers with his agent and his proposal, which he’d pulled together over a weekend. “It was like Paulson’s original tarp proposal,” Andrew Ross Sorkin tells me, referring to the former Treasury secretary. “His was three pages, mine was three pages.” We’re sitting at the Lyric Diner on Third Avenue on a Monday morning. Sorkin’s Tuesday Times column is due in a few hours, but, as usual, he’s way behind, and later I learn that he missed it entirely and his editors had to scramble. His excuse is that he’s got a book, Too Big to Fail, to promote. Too Big to Fail, for which Viking paid a reported $700,000 and which debuted at No. 4 on the Times’ best-seller list, is a nearly minute-by-minute account of the financial crisis as observed through the eyes of the clashing Wall Street CEOs who drove their investment banks into the abyss and the government regulators who watched powerless from the sidelines. The book has become a kind of media sensation. In a review for the Financial Times, John Gapper declared that Andrew Ross Sorkin had written this generation’s Barbarians at the Gate. Charlie Rose compared Sorkin to Bob Woodward. Vanity Fair published an excerpt and held a book party at Graydon Carter’s Monkey Bar (“Part of the package we put together for him,” Carter says). Three weeks ago, as the book landed in stores, Sorkin blanketed the airwaves, beginning with an October 19 appearance on the Today show, followed by multiple stops on CNBC and his second appearance in a month on Charlie Rose. “I’m very surprised by the reaction,” Sorkin explains, as we sit over bowls of oatmeal at a rear table. “But it’s good! I can’t complain.” Despite the highs of the past week, Andrew Ross Sorkin looks exhausted. He’s eschewed his usual Ted Baker suits—“You have to dress like them,” he says of his cast of sources—for jeans, a striped blue shirt, and a blazer. At a particularly loud moment in our interview, when he picks up my digital recorder and holds it to his mouth, he looks like a CEO dictating notes to himself.
"So I'm the schmuck?" said Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, after he realized Bank of America would likely drop its bid to buy the firm.
"I'm certain you'll spark a fuckin' panic..." Timothy F. Geithner, then the president of the New York Federal Reserve, to Henry M. Paulson, on disclosing his $700 billion bailout plan without first preparing Congressional leaders.
In May 2010, James Pressley wrote “Sorkin’s ‘Too Big to Fail’ Is Finalist in Samuel Johnson Prize” for Bloomberg, in which he reported: The new Andrew Ross Sorkin book, “Too Big to Fail” made the final round in the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, an annual U.K. nonfiction award worth 20,000 pounds ($28,650) to the winner. Sorkin’s cinematic reconstruction of how Wall Street and Washington struggled to save the financial system will compete against an eclectic mix of titles on topics ranging from mathematics and fishing to King Charles II of England and the brutalized lives of North Koreans, the organizers said in an e- mailed statement. Billed as the U.K.’s richest award for the genre, the Samuel Johnson Prize is sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corp. This year’s selection of finalists defies categorization, said the chairman of the judging panel, economist and Radio 4 presenter Evan Davis. “Perhaps the only common feature of these books is the passion and sheer enthusiasm of the authors for their subjects,” Davis said in the release.
"When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France."
- Senator Jim Bunning to Henry M. Paulson after the Treasury sought authority to invest in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
"The money’s walking out the door."
- Morgan Stanley President Walid Chammah, the day investors withdrew $20 billion from the bank
"What the fuck was that all about? Was he offering to merge with us?" Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack after a meeting with Lehman executives at his house.
In March 2010, Mike Fleming reported “HBO To Make Financial Collapse Drama From NY Timesman's 'Too Big to Fail” for Deadline.com: An HBO movie about the 2008 financial meltdown is finally moving. HBO has acquired rights to Too Big to Fail, the bestselling book by New York Times reporter Andrew Sorkin. Peter Gould has been hired to write the drama, and Spring Creek’s Paula Weinstein and Jeffrey Levine are executive producers. The project has been slow going because it was first set up with a book co-written by Andrew Sorkin's Times colleague Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair writer Bethany McLean, and they haven't turned in their manuscript. HBO execs say they will marry the source materials to chronicle the financial crisis the same way that Recount dissected the disputed Florida results in the 2000 presidential election. For his part, Andrew Sorkin says his book lends itself well to that task. He focused specifically on players like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his successor Timothy Geitner, Lehman Bros CEO Richard Fuld, and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, in boardrooms, private planes and bedrooms as the financial system teetered on the brink of collapse. “You see their human sides, the hubris, the ego,” Andrew Ross Sorkin said. “You see Hank Paulsen literally vomiting and Dick Fuld crying with his wife as their world fell apart."
Legendary Blackstone co-founder Peter G. Peterson was stunned by Timothy Geithner's youthful appearance when he first met him, later telling Larry Summers: "He's twelve years old!"
In December 2009, Stephen Foley wrote a review for The Independent: Too Big to Fail rips along at such a pace that even the reader is hard-pressed to stop and ask the what ifs. While no one can be happy that the tale ends with taxpayers paying hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up failed banks and fallible bankers, there are few signposts to better outcomes. That the US Treasury secretary came from Goldman, and didn't have to learn the intricacies of derivatives trading on the job, seems a blessing, rather than the curse many now suggest. It was bad enough that the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a former Congressman called Christopher Cox, appears "cryogenically frozen" in fear; how much worse if all the president's men had been the same? Journalists are normally content to write the first draft of history, but Ross Sorkin, mergers and acquisitions reporter for the New York Times, is performing well above his pay grade. He has augmented 500 hours of interviews with 200 participants with access to their email and phone records, private notes and even expenses forms. Too Big to Fail stakes a good claim to being the definitive story of our once-in-a-lifetime crisis.
Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is a Gerald Loeb Award-winning American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and is the newspaper's chief mergers and acquisitions reporter. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service, published by The New York Times. Andrew Sorkin graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1995 and earned a a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1999. Sorkin first joined The Times during his senior year in high school, as a student intern. He also worked for the paper while he was in college, publishing 71 articles before he graduated. He began by writing media and technology articles while assisting Stuart Elliott, The Times' advertising columnist. Andrew Sorkin spent the summer of 1996 working for Business Week, before returning to The Times. He moved to London for part of 1998. While there, he wrote about European business and technology for The Times, and then returned to Cornell to complete his studies. Sorkin joined The Times full time in 1999 as the newspaper's European mergers and acquisitions reporter, based in London, and the following year became The Times' chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, based in New York, a position he still holds. In addition, Andrew Sorkin started his financial-news website and email newsletter, DealBook, which he continues to edit. He writes a column by the same name (since April 2004) in the Tuesday editions (initially in Sunday editions). Andrew Sorkin also holds the title of assistant editor of business and finance news.
The Andrew Sorkin book on the Wall Street banking crisis, Too Big to Fail, was published by Viking October 20, 2009. The book won the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for best business book of the year, was on the shortlist for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and was on The New York Times Best Seller list (business) for 6 months. Filming began on the HBO production on October 22, 2010 with director Curtis Hanson at the helm. The A-List cast includes Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernanke, William Hurt as Hank Paulson, Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner, Dan Hedaya as Barney Frank, as well as Topher Grace as Jim Wilkinson (former U.S. government employee). The expected release date is unknown at this time, but expectations are no later than early 2012. Andrew Sorkin also won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award for breaking news in 2005 and again in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. Also in 2007, SiliconAlleyInsider.com named Sorkin one of New York's "most influential scribes." In 2008, Vanity Fair magazine named Sorkin as one of 40 new members of the "Next Establishment." Andrew Sorkin is also recognized as one of Scarsdale High School's Distinguished Alumni.
The author of his controversial and interesting books were recently the subject of a review on The Economist, which was titled "Oh me, oh my: Why Gordon Brown won’t be believed by everyone." MANY politicians use their memoirs to settle old scores. Newspapers scour them for juicy titbits of who said what to whom, and which leaders were perpetually drunk or unreliable. Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, is above such gossip. His first post-election effort is an analysis of the financial crisis that dominated his premiership. But “Beyond the Crash” is no less revealing for the absence of tittle-tattle. The tone is set in the four-page prologue which contains 34 instances of the words “I”, “me” or “my”. Later on, readers are told of several occasions when an anecdote by Mr Brown would reduce global leaders to silence or a speech would provoke rounds of applause from audiences. You can find the rest of that Economist review of the author's latest book, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization, here. As expected, the author's on tour, peddling the book. See the media posted below.
Thomas Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter that used to work for the Wall Street Journal. He now blogs for Foreign Policy and is a fellow scholar at the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy and military think tank. Recently, on NPR's Forum with Michael Krasny, he picked his top 5 books about the war in Iraq, and listed the author Rajiv Chandrasekaran and his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City as his favorite. Now, the business and marketing around these interesting books or book is odd. The Kindle version of the book is marketed as the Green Zone, while the original hardcover of course retains its original title (just in case that throws you off at the bookstore; check for both titles). Author Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes and edits for the Washington Post, and recently wrote "The Longest War: Afghan Strategy's Proving Ground." Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover) won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2007 and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction. Other interesting books about the war in Iraq: Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, House to House: An Epic Memoir of War.
”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.
,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, 
, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "
, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "
by Michael Lewis
. Michael Burry left work as a Stanford Hospital neurology resident to become a full-time investor and start his own hedge fund. He had already developed a reputation as an investor by demonstrating astounding success in "value investing," which he wrote about on a message board beginning in 1996. He was so successful with his stock picks that he attracted the interest of such companies as Vanguard and White Mountains Insurance Group, as well as prominent investors such as Joel Greenblatt. In November 2000, Michael Burry shut down his website and discontinued posting to the message board. He did this in order to focus completely and exclusively on launching Scion Capital, which he funded with a modest inheritance and various loans from family members. The company was named after 
, a favorite childhood book. Burry quickly earned extraordinary profits for his investors.
," his hilarious and enlightening account of life as a bond broker in the go-go '80s, I did not anticipate something this good, something capable of carrying its weight as a bookend to "
, Gabriel Sherman wrote "The Information Broker" for New York magazine, about how Andrew Ross Sorkin, himself, is "too big to fail" in the eyes of the company that he works for: For journalists, bad news can be good news. And so, in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse last September, as the world’s economy teetered, an all-star roster of business journalists—Roger Lowenstein, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean—raced to shop book proposals to chronicle the epochal events unfolding on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. On the morning of September 23, 2008, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times’ then-31-year-old star financial reporter, made the rounds to publishers with his agent and his proposal, which he’d pulled together over a weekend. “It was like Paulson’s original tarp proposal,” Andrew Ross Sorkin tells me, referring to the former Treasury secretary. “His was three pages, mine was three pages.” We’re sitting at the Lyric Diner on Third Avenue on a Monday morning. Sorkin’s Tuesday Times column is due in a few hours, but, as usual, he’s way behind, and later I learn that he missed it entirely and his editors had to scramble. His excuse is that he’s got a book, 
, 
won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2007 and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction. Other interesting books about the war in Iraq: 
, 
, 
.