Sources used in this document:

Mr. Taubman had other worries. Maybe they were being used to help Lehman goose its stock price? "If I were their guys, I'd want to put my own spin on this."

In combination, those passages (and other hints throughout the book) leave wide open the question about whether or to what degree the Treasury Secretary honored his legal obligation.

If there is a weakness to Sorkin's work, it might be that it fails to provide a more detailed explanation of the underlying problems throughout the financial derivatives market that gave rise to the problems responsible for Lehman's and Goldman Sach's and AIG's predicaments. By contrast, Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (W.W. Norton, 2011) both do a better job of explaining how mechanisms devised in those firms (such as so-called "credit default swaps") that were designed very specifically to circumvent regulatory policies prohibiting taking out insurance on certain kinds of investment outcome losses (Lewis, 2010; 2011). It was precisely those decisions that laid the groundwork for the risk environment exploited by Goldman Sachs and AIG that ultimately triggered their collapse and that almost took down the entire American economy when the housing bubble burst, virtually instantaneously obligating the issuers of those non-insurance types of insurance policies against the drop in mortgage derivatives to make good on those agreements (Lewis, 2010; 2011). While Sorkin presents a dramatic look into the interpersonal exchanges and relationships at the center of the circumstances leading up to the infamous Wall Street bailout, works such as those by Lewis do a better of job helping lay readers actually understand how those events actually occurred.