On a mid-September morning in 2008, Americans awoke to discover the unthinkable: The nation's financial system was in free fall. One of Wall Street's most prestigious investment banks, Lehman Brothers, had filed for bankruptcy, and the equally illustrious Merrill Lynch was forced to sell itself in a fire sale to Bank of America. Within days the world's largest insurance firm, AIG, would be nationalized while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, following their own near-death experiences, voluntarily turned themselves into highly regulated banks, seemingly surrendering their ability to take big risks - the very risks that made them rich. In Washington, a fading Bush administration would reluctantly overcome its aversion to intervene in the marketplace by temporarily nationalizing virtually an entire industry. The government - U.S. taxpayers - would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to help save the banking system. In Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first definitive blow-by-blow account of this epochal crisis - from the machinations inside Lehman Brothers' plush offices to the corridors of power in Washington to secret meetings in Moscow. Sorkin recounts how, motivated as often by ego and greed as by fear and sheer self-preservation, the most powerful men and women in finance and politics decided the fate of the world's economy. This true story is not only a look at banks that were too big to fail but also a humbling human drama about a cast of bold-faced names who thought they themselves were too big to fail.