Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner: revisiting the 2008 financial crisis | Howard Davies
Three of the key players co-author a book about lessons of the past and make proposals for the future
Journalists, the adage goes, write the first rough draft of history. It’s a grand claim, but perhaps the best of them achieve something close to that. In the case of the great financial crisis of 2008, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times did so in his book Too Big to Fail, which remains a useful description of how it felt on Wall Street when the markets began to collapse. Sorkin had good access to the key people involved.
The second draft of history is often written by the key people themselves. After the second world war, Winston Churchill confidently asserted that history would treat him kindly because “I propose to write that history”. When the financial crisis erupted, the same thought may have crossed the minds of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, who were US Treasury secretary, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, and president of the New York Fed, respectively. All three published lengthy memoirs explaining why they did and didn’t, do what they did and didn’t do – inevitably, with a degree of self-justification in each case.