2008 Economic Crash: Lewis, Sorkin, and Wessel Analyzed
This paper compares three journalistic accounts of the 2008 financial crisis — Michael Lewis's The Big Short, Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust — to examine how government indifference and a culture of unaccountability allowed the economic collapse to occur. Drawing on characters such as Steve Eisman and Vinny Daniel, the paper contrasts Lewis's human-interest storytelling with Wessel's restrained institutional narrative and Sorkin's detail-rich account of the crisis's final days. The central argument is that the crash resulted not from a fiscal failure but from a fundamental failure of accountability at every level of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the White House.
- Introduction: Three Accounts of a Financial Collapse: Three books frame the 2008 crash analysis
- Lewis and the Worldview of Wall Street: Wall Street's self-interested worldview enables collapse
- Eisman and Daniel: Voices of Conscience: Eisman and Daniel expose subprime mortgage fraud
- The Ponzi Scheme Unravels: Global financial collapse follows Ponzi-like implosion
- Sorkin's Details and the Lehman Fallout: Goldman Sachs benefits as Lehman Brothers collapses
- Wessel's Heroes and the Limits of Fed Reporting: Wessel's restrained narrative shields Fed from criticism
- Conclusion: Accountability and the Crash of 2008: Unaccountability at all levels caused the crisis
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses a comparative three-source framework to build a coherent argument, showing how each book's narrative style reflects its author's underlying assumptions about accountability and blame.
- Character-driven analysis — focusing on Eisman and Daniel as conscience figures — grounds abstract financial concepts in human behavior, making the argument accessible and concrete.
- The literary comparison to Macbeth and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman demonstrates interdisciplinary thinking, connecting financial journalism to broader themes of moral failure and tragic heroism.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models comparative textual analysis across nonfiction sources. Rather than summarizing each book in isolation, it places them in dialogue — contrasting Lewis's narrative depth against Wessel's institutional deference and Sorkin's detail-heavy reportage — to support a single unified thesis about the role of accountability in the 2008 crash. This synthesis technique is essential for literature reviews and argumentative research papers at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by establishing context through Lewis's earlier work, then introduces its central thesis about government indifference. It proceeds thematically rather than book-by-book, weaving all three sources together as it examines worldview, conscience, regulatory failure, the collapse itself, and the aftermath. The conclusion returns to all three books and evaluates them on the criterion of "worldview" introduced in the opening — a tight rhetorical circle that gives the essay structural integrity.
Introduction: Three Accounts of a Financial Collapse
Michael Lewis gives an excellent first impression of Wall Street in the 1980s with an outsider's introduction to the inside world of stocks, bonds, and debt reshuffling. Lewis's The Big Short is a follow-up to his Liar's Poker, which chronicled his three years with Salomon Brothers as a naive, twenty-four-year-old, inexperienced financial advisor who made a "preposterous" amount of money for telling others how to place their bets: "Wall Street's essential function was to allocate capital: to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue. I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage" (Lewis xiii). Yet what happened that decade — and continued to happen for the next two — was every bit as "preposterous" as the salary Lewis was paid to do a job he had no idea how to perform.
Lewis, in short, provides the context for the world of financial banking, while Andrew Sorkin and David Wessel set the stage for readers to see the failure of the people in charge to regulate the machine that would ultimately crash in 2008. Using Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, Wessel's In Fed We Trust, and Lewis's The Big Short, this paper analyzes the government indifference that allowed the economic crash of 2008 to happen.
Lewis and the Worldview of Wall Street
Lewis begins his big story by telling a small one about Meredith Whitney, whose exposé on Citigroup in 2007 began a series of Wall Street unravelings. Lewis contacted her to find out what kind of person had fired that shot so succinctly: she was no one special — a graduate of Brown University who earned a degree without having really learned anything. She credited whatever success she had to one man, her mentor at Oppenheimer and Co., Steve Eisman — another nobody by political standards — but a man who "helped her to establish not merely a career but a worldview" (xvii). That latter detail is significant, for it is what is most lacking in the financial world. A person's worldview defines his actions and who he is.
The worldview of Wall Street — and of the government that had been in its back pocket for thirty years — had begun and ended right there: with Wall Street. This is the evolution of self-interest. Such a worldview cannot sustain anything, and it finally let its philosophical adherents crash in 2008 — only to be bailed out, magically, by sheer whimsy and will. As David Wessel says, "In Fed we trust" — and therein lies the problem.
According to Wessel, however, the Fed is part of the solution: "The United States found itself at the edge of the abyss and was pulled back in large measure through the efforts of the Federal Reserve" (vii). It is a claim that sounds jarringly unoriginal and fairly incongruous with statements from journalists like Matt Taibbi and politicians like Ron Paul, who blast the Fed as an out-and-out criminal enterprise. Wessel references economic historian Brad DeLong, who offers this analysis: "It is either our curse or our blessing that we live in the Republic of the Central Banker" (4). For Wessel, the Federal Reserve is an amalgam of good and bad decisions — note the Greenspan era, when "the smart people of the Federal Reserve allowed the housing bubble to inflate" (4). Ben Bernanke, then Fed chairman, is, according to Wessel, doing his legitimate best to ease America back into a stable economy. The problem is that Wessel believes the Fed is necessary. People like Ron Paul see the Fed as part of the problem. The fact is that the country was in more of a shake-up than people like Wessel cared to realize. His treatise on two years of recovery is revealing, but it glosses over the larger issue: Wessel cannot see the forest for the trees.
Works Cited
Lewis, Michael M. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print.
Sorkin, Andrew. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves. New York, NY: Penguin, 2010. Print.
Wessel, David. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2010. Print.
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