The Weekend That Changed Wall Street: An Eyewitness Account

"Another source in the Treasury spoke with me, the sadness and frustration clear in his voice. 'It wasn't like a decision was made on Friday that these guys were just doomed and we were going to let them go. There was an attempt over that entire weekend to save them. And the fact is, we didn't. So in that sense it was a failure, and once Barclays pulled out, we didn't have any other options. We didn't have the legal authority to do anything differently. So I don't blame us for failing that weekend. I blame the fact that we didn't have mechanisms set up in advance to deal with these sorts of contingencies'. He sighed and added, 'It would be great if we were all smarter, but we're not.'"

A first-person account of the white-knuckle weekend that brought the financial world to its knees and changed Wall Street forever, from America's most famous business reporter.

During a single historic weekend (September 12-14, 2008) the fate of Lehman Brothers was sealed, Merrill Lynch barely survived, AIG became a ward of the federal government, and the roots of our seemingly strong economy teetered on the edge of collapse. As bankers and government officials scrambled to keep the economy from total collapse, and Americans tried to make sense of it all, top CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo spent the entire weekend taking frantic phone calls from the most powerful players on Wall Street and in Washington.

Those CEOs, politicians, and dozens of other sources gave Bartiromo behind-the- scenes details on the crisis and its aftermath, the personalities involved, and the emotions at work during one of the most stressful periods in American economic history. Now she draws on her high-level network to provide an eyewitness account of the biggest events of the financial crisis, including exclusive interviews with former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg, former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, and former Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg, among many others.

Her sources candidly divulged personal and unreported information. For example, during a commercial break on her show, Paulson, who had been explaining the government bailout package, told her, "In six months, you will understand why we did what we did." It wasn't apparent then, but months later it was revealed that the government's secrecy regarding who got the bailout money was intended to hide the shocking financial condition of Citigroup-the largest bank in the world.

Writing with both authority and dramatic flair, Bartiromo not only weaves a thrilling and fresh account of the events of that fateful weekend but provides a unique analysis of the crisis and its aftermath She shows how decades of unbridled risk taking led to one of the biggest and most dramatic economic meltdowns in history and tackles the big questions: is any company too big to fail-and if so should it be? Should the government spend taxpayer dollars to bail out companies whose plights are largely the result of their own mismanagement? And finally, what have we learned from this crisis? Will we return to business as usual or has Wall Street really changed?

The Financial Times

One of the 50 people who shaped the last decade . . . The CNBC anchor has made the transition to the inner circle of the global business elite.

Maria Bartiromo is the anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo and the anchor and managing editor of the nationally syndicated Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo. She has been reporting from the New York Stock Exchange for seventeen years and has covered Wall Street for more than twenty years. She was the first person to report from the floor of the NYSE and was recently chosen to be inducted in the Cable Hall of Fame for helping to change the way business news is covered on television. Previously, she wrote a weekly column in BusinessWeek and has written monthly columns for Individual Investor, Ticker, and Reader's Digest magazines. She has also been published in the Financial Times and Town & Country. She is on the board of New York University and recently won an Emmy Award for her reporting on the financial crisis.