Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

“While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.”

“There are no atheists in foxholes or ideologues in a financial crisis. Ben Bernanke”

“Everyone thinks Goldman is so fucking smart,” he railed. “Just because Goldman says this is the right valuation, you shouldn’t assume it’s correct just because Goldman said it. My brother works at Goldman, and he’s an idiot!”

“The battle between bankers and traders is the closest thing to class warfare on Wall Street. Investment banking was esteemed as an art, while trading was more like a sport, something that required skill, but not necessarily brains or creativity.”

“This generation of Wall Street CEOs could be the ones to forfeit America’s trust. When the history of the Great Recession is written, they can be singled out as the bonus babies who were so shortsighted that they put the economy at risk and contributed to the destruction of their own companies. Or they can acknowledge how Americans’ trust has been lost and take the first steps to earn it back.”

“When the post-bailout debate was still at its highest pitch, Jamie Dimon sent Hank Paulson a note with a quote from a speech that President Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910 entitled “Citizenship in a Republic.” It reads: It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

“Goldman’s top four officers could not sell more than 10 percent of their Goldman shares until 2011, or until Buffett sold his own, even if they left the firm. He had explained his rationale for this condition to Blankfein by saying, “If I’m buying the horse, I’m buying the jockey, too.”

“The numbers were, at best, guesstimates, and all three men knew it. The relevant figure would ultimately be the one that represented the most they could possibly ask from Congress without raising too many questions. Whatever that sum turned out to be, they knew they could count on (Interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury) Kashkari to perform some sort of mathematical voodoo to justify it:”

“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, Other People’s Money: And How the Bankers Use It, 1913”

“The seeds of disaster had been planted years earlier with such measures as: the deregulation of the banks in the late 1990s; the push to increase home ownership, which encouraged lax mortgage standards; historically low interest rates, which created a liquidity bubble; and the system of Wall Street compensation that rewarded short-term risk taking. They all came together to create the perfect storm.”

“Something that happens every five to seven years.” By that standard, we are already overdue.”

“By that standard, we are already overdue.”

“2008, as he sought to counter his critics. “Its purpose is not to weaken the free market. It is to preserve the free market.”

“He suggested that there was too much housing supply and that the only real way to really fix the problem would be for the government to buy up vacant homes and burn them.”

“Paulson had helped create it with the goal of having it fail.”

“will permit them to take even more risk while knowing the government will save them.”

“I’m not sure if they had blown the whistle how much good it would have done.”

“For all the anger directed at Wall Street, there was still a portion left over for the government and its own handling of the crisis.”

“They wanted to know to know exactly who was to blame for the crisis.”

“Goldman’s trades have so far paid off, but what if it had bet the wrong way?”

“Should decisions about how the company spent its money be made in reaction to popular opinion or with the goal of achieving profits?”

“he knew nothing about it, and by the time a discussion about his compensation reached the full board, he had withdrawn any request for a bonus.”

“For them the turnaround that had been promised didn’t come soon enough.”

“Lehman was more the consequence than the cause of a deteriorating economic climate.”

“The deals hatched in sleepless sessions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or at Treasury were no different. They were products of their moment.”

“Geithner says that the bank bailouts, as successful as they were, could never be fully appreciated.”

“This document does not reflect calls on his cell phone or home phone.”

“The news reports, however, kept feeding off one another and therefore missed the underlying truth:”

“the program was fundamentally an attempt to stabilize the financial system and keep conditions from growing worse,”

“Even with the help of cash infusions some of the country’s major banks continued to falter.”