Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves was released today in paperback in the United States. The papckerback edition is available in bookstores nationwide and online:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Borders

HBO has optioned “Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves” and is developing it into a film. Oscar winner, William Hurt, has signed on to play Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary. Curtis Hansen, who won an Oscar for L.A. Confidential, will direct the picture. Peter Gould is writing the screenplay. Hanson will be executive producer along with Spring Creek Productions’ Paula Weinstein and Jeffrey Levine. Carol Fenelon is co-executive producer and Ezra Swerdlow is producer. Andrew Ross Sorkin is a consulting producer.

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“Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves” won the Gerald Loeb Award, one of the highest honors in business journalism for best book, 2010.

Too Big to Fail was also short-listed for The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction award.

In addition, Too Big to Fail is on the long list for the Financial Times/Goldman Sach  Business Book of the Year Award 2010.

UPDATE: The original owner of the 2BG2FAIL license plate, Robert Kindler, a vice chairman at Morgan Stanley who is one of the firm’s top mergers and acquisitions advisors, has a new license plate! (He’s one of the many characters in “Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves”.)

Kindler, whose brother is comedian Andy Kindler (formerly of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and a regular on “The Late Show with David Letterman”), is now riding around with a license plate that says “MNA GUY.” Kindler, whose jokes on Wall Street are legendary – when he worked at JPMorgan, he had shirts made up mocking the firm’s slogan: “One Firm. One Team. Bribe a Leader.” — sent me his old 2BG2FAIL license plate in the mail. It came with a note saying that he had ordered the plate as a satirical reminder that “no one is too big to fail.”

Here’s the new plate:

Original Post:

In Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves, this picture is included of a banker’s license plate that was made as a joke after the financial crisis:

In Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves, Andrew Ross Sorkin provides new details about what was then a secret Treasury plan to save the banking system presented on April 15, 2008 — five months before TARP was introduced — to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The plan, called the “Break the Glass” Bank Recapitalization Plan, was written by Treasury staffers Neel T. Kashkari and Phillip Swagel. The plan was the basis for the TARP proposal made in September 2008 after the financial panic began.

The “Break the Glass” plan contemplated that the government would buy toxic assets from the nation’s banks. It also discussed several other strategies for the government to help ailing banks using $500 billion of taxpayer money — including making direct capital injections into the banks. (The ultimate TARP plan called for $700 billion.)

Remarkably , the 10-page document discussed the pros and cons of buying toxic assets. Among the cons, the Treasury staffers identified two that continue to cause public outrage:

“Without a complimentary program, does nothing to help homeowners (for which there would be enormous political pressure)”

“No guarantee banks will resume lending.”

Up until now, the full “Break the Glass” document has never been discosed. The paper, which was obtained by the author during the course of his reporting for the book, was used as a source document in Chapter Five of Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves.

Here it is:

Too Big To Fail: Confidential “Break the Glass” Plan from Treasury

Warren Buffett publicly discussed Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves in recent weeks on both Charlie Rose and CNBC.

On Charlie Rose, Buffett said of Too Big to Fail, “It’s a very good book.”

Separately, on CNBC’s Town Hall event with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at Columbia University, Buffett told the audience about Too Big to Fail in response to a question from the audience.

After Buffett first read Too Big to Fail, he sent Sorkin a super-sized telegram with the following inscription:

Andrew,

Congratulations! Your book will be bigger than this telegram!

Warren

As detailed in Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves, Morgan Stanley received a $9 billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ in the fall of 2008 that kept the firm from collapsing. The payment was supposed to be wired electronically, but because it needed to be made on an emergency basis on a holiday, Mitsubishi cut a physical check, perhaps the largest ever written.

Below is a copy of the $9,000,000,000.00 check.

Too Big to Fail: The $9 Billion Japanese Check to Morgan Stanley

The Economist reviewed Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves in this week’s edition, calling it “too good to put down….It is the story of the actors in the most extraordinary financial spectacle in 80 years, and it is told brilliantly. Other blow-by-blow accounts are in the works. It is hard to imagine them being this riveting.” Here is the full review.

It is meticulously researched, drawing on interviews with more than 200 of those who participated directly in the events it covers, including their handwritten notes and tape-recordings of critical meetings. The result is a compelling reconstruction of the drama surrounding the government seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman’s collapse, the rescue of American International Group (AIG), the subsequent market pandemonium and the shoring-up of big banks’ capital with public funds.

The Financial Times’ John Gapper calls Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves an “astonishing narrative of the epic financial crisis of 2008…an extraordinary achievement that will be hard to surpass as the definitive account.” Read the full review here.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has broken the Barbarians curse….Sorkin’s strength is that he knows Wall Street intimately and he brings to life its biggest domestic crisis with immense reporting zeal and narrative skill. Others will tell the story with more distance and perspective but, as a dramatic close-up, his book is hard to beat.

Bloomberg News’ James Pressley reviewed Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves on Thursday October 22, 2009.

Sorkin has pulled off a rare feat. He has turned more than 500 hours of interviews and documentary evidence ranging from e-mails to call logs into an engrossing fly-on-the-wall account of one of the most tumultuous years in U.S. history….What sets this account apart is its smooth synthesis of telling details, conversations and multiple story lines into a seamless narrative written in lean, unembroidered sentences. It reads like a thriller without the hype.

Read the full review here>>