Thanks to Pilar Queen for encouraging her husband, Andrew Ross Sorkin, to write the book Too Big to Fail on the events surrounding our recent near financial market meltdown. I loved the read. Gripping tale.
I also loved Dick Fuld, though he was a tragic character. Having worked in investment banking on a small scale with a man who Fuld reminded me of, I could really enter into Fuld’s world as his Lehman Brothers inexplicably fell apart all around him. There was much to learn from his experience.
We should all be on notice. With global financial networks still as interconnected as ever–and driven by the same risk-taking as ever–the systemic risks we faced in and around September 2008 are not mitigated.
As my friend Dennis Peacocke reminded me recently, we are effectively stealing from our children with our recalcitrant short-term profit focus. What ever happened to making things grow to have sustainable value the old school way?
When I look at young people today and the interconnectedness of their world and the tools of their communication, I look ahead and see this media ecology will inevitably produce an interconnected outlook as their generation comes of age. This stands in stark contrast to the monolithic silos of finance, which is the model by which Wall Street banks were built, diversified and globalized though they are now. Perhaps these firms and their opaque, hierarchical structures will inevitably fail. Perhaps that may be needed for the young minds to have a more suitable financial order to govern in their day, as hard as that transition may be.
Anyway, do yourself a favor and ditch Twitter, facebook, email, and all the rest of the Web 2.0 tools for a spell. Please slow down and read Sorkin’s book. But if you don’t, and the markets crash again, and the system does not get bailed out as a result, please don’t come crying.
If there is anything Wall Street implicitly understands, it is that life is war. Competition is inherent to the human condition in this fallen world, as is collaboration when the survival of all is in question. That leads me to my biggest takeaways from the book:
1) seeing the way the top-most players in finance really work, live, and communicate;
2) appreciating how hard it is to square common conspiracy theories with these events; and
3) recognizing that the entire political economy handed off to us from the Boomers and their parents is not too big to fail–in fact, in their broad ideological hubris they seem to be STILL too self-focused to see that systemic survival is STILL very much in question.
And if anyone thinks I am going to sit idly by to wait to find out if the crash is coming or not, you best keep your ears on and see…
UPDATED 1/27/10.