The Weekend That Changed Wall Street: An Eyewitness Account Hardcover - 2010

by Maria Bartiromo; Catherine Whitney (With)

A first-person account of the white-knuckle weekend that brought the financial world to its knees and changed Wall Street forever, from America's most famous business reporter.

During a single historic weekend (September 12-14, 2008) the fate of Lehman Brothers was sealed, Merrill Lynch barely survived, AIG became a ward of the federal government, and the roots of our seemingly strong economy teetered on the edge of collapse. As bankers and government officials scrambled to keep the economy from total collapse, and Americans tried to make sense of it all, top CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo spent the entire weekend taking frantic phone calls from the most powerful players on Wall Street and in Washington.

Those CEOs, politicians, and dozens of other sources gave Bartiromo behind-the-scenes details on the crisis and its aftermath, the personalities involved, and the emotions at work during one of the most stressful periods in American economic history. Now she draws on her high-level network to provide an eyewitness account of the biggest events of the financial crisis, including exclusive interviews with former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg, former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, and former Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg, among many others.

Her sources candidly divulged personal and unreported information. For example, during a commercial break on her show, Paulson, who had been explaining the government bailout package, told her, "In six months, you will understand why we did what we did." It wasn't apparent then, but months later it was revealed that the government's secrecy regarding who got the bailout money was intended to hide the shocking financial condition of Citigroup-the largest bank in the world.

Writing with both authority and dramatic flair, Bartiromo not only weaves a thrilling and fresh account of the events of that fateful weekend but provides a unique analysis of the crisis and its aftermath She shows how decades of unbridled risk taking led to one of the biggest and most dramatic economic meltdowns in history and tackles the big questions: is any company too big to fail-and if so should it be? Should the government spend taxpayer dollars to bail out companies whose plights are largely the result of their own mismanagement? And finally, what have we learned from this crisis? Will we return to business as usual or has Wall Street really changed?