29.9.10

As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been writing up an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big To Fail. It covers an EXHILARATING range of topics, from the pernicious effect of government bailouts to the hubris and pride of Wall Street’s darlings. It came out in yesterday’s City AM and you can read the first part of it here!

"I WANTED it to be like that Quentin Tarantino movie: every person should come away with a different picture. I wanted to almost do it with no judgment.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin is in London for the Samuel L Johnson literary awards after Too Big To Fail, his best-selling account of the financial crisis, was short-listed for the prize. But before heading off to a string of other engagements, he finds time for a leisurely iced tea with City A.M., to talk all things Wall Street.

His desire to write the book “without judgment” is hardly surprising coming from the star finance reporter of the New York Times, a paper that regards itself as a keeper of historical records.

But Sorkin has a further reason to write this particular story “without judgment”: his aim was to complicate the conventional narrative about “greedy bankers” bringing down the economy. “Part of the goal of the project was to put the reader in the room with them. When you get inside the room, your field of vision changes,” he says. His tactic is to take readers so close to the main characters of his story – characters that include former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson and former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld – that we can see the dandruff on their collars.

…continue…