On the Brink HARDCOVER [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover: 458 pages
• Publisher: Business Plus
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0755360540
• ISBN-13: 978-0755360543
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (115 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,676,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry M. Paulson, Jr. served under President George W. Bush as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury from June 2006 until January 2009. Before coming to Treasury, Paulson was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs since the firm's initial public offering in 1999. He joined Goldman Sachs Chicago Office in 1974 and rose through the ranks holding several positions including, Managing Partner of the firm's Chicago office, Co-head of the firm's investment Banking Division, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Co-Senior partner.

Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Paulson was a member of the White House Domestic Council, serving as Staff Assistant to the President from 1972 to 1973, and as Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon from 1970 to 1972.

Paulson graduated from Dartmouth in 1968, where he majored in English, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and an All Ivy, All East football player. He received an M.B.A. from Harvard in 1970.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 128 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insider narrative, but still ignores a few important factors, February 1, 2010

By 

Jim Galt (St. Louis MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (Hardcover)

A book like this should be read only along with books like The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It or The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. These books are about the much broader topics of risk management and risk in finance, respectively, but they do put On the Brink in context.

Paulson has written a detailed, blow by blow, narrative account of several specific meetings leading up to and during the financial crisis. Less of the book deals with stepping outside of these meetings to analyze other specific causes, but there is some of that. The reader has to be careful of an attempt by Paulson to recast his own role in a more favorable light, but I haven't seen anything detailed enough to specifically contradict him, yet.

Paulson does mention an interesting and almost complete list of players in this crisis - Freddie, Fannie, Bernanke, Bush, etc. But he is almost silent on some of the more subtle players like the mathematical models that underestimated these risks (Taleb and Hubbard do and excellent job of this). He reiterates throughout the book that the events seemed "impossible" and yet they are events that seem to happen once or twice a century (Especially considering some of the relaxed regulation and oversight that preceeeded it).

He does mention the role of Credit Default Swaps in the crisis but not, say, the Gaussian Copula, Options, or Value at Risk. The use of such methods are at least partly to blame.

The reader has to assume Paulson's agenda of getting history to come out the way that casts him the way he would like to see it. But it is still an excellent account. We should like to see the accounts of Bernanke and Geithner someday and compare them side-by-side.

34 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Apologies for Greed, January 24, 2011

By 

Dave C - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (Hardcover)

Like so many "over the shoulder" assessments of major historical events, Mr. Paulson's account is very self-serving.

He doesn't bother to address why - when the government had tremendous leverage in working out the bailout of AIG - it did next to nothing in holding banks like Goldman Sachs accountable for their poor decision-making. So AIG, propped up by American taxpayers, paid 100 cents on the dollar for the credit default swaps purchased by Goldman Sachs. These swaps in themselves were a suspect approach to managing risk. Moreover, the government never required the investment firms - whose senior management made atrocious gambles - to replace these inept executives (such as GS's Lloyd "We're doing God's work" Blankfein) although they didn't hesitate to take out the head of GM (Rick Wagoner)when we bailed out the auto industry.

So how to explain Mr. Paulson's role in all this and his self-justifying apologies for greed? Well here's an astonishing coincidence: he's the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Surprise, surprise! And another tidbit about where Mr. Paulson acquired his ethical compass: he was a special assistant to John Ehrlichman in the Nixon White House.

I invite people to read this book, but I would advise against attaching any credibility to Mr. Paulson's view of the near collapse of our financial system.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An good view of how the gov't dealt with the finanical crisis, November 15, 2010

By 

John Forman "Author -The Essentials of Trading" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (Hardcover)

On the Brink is basically a diary of Paulson's time as Treasury Secretary, which ran from 2006 to 2008. That, of course, encompasses the most dramatic period of the financial crisis, running from when things started coming unglued in 2007 to the point at the end of the Bush administration when the financial markets were just about finally stabilized. The book details the sequence of events which covers the Bear Stearns take-over, the Lehman collapse, the receivership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the AIG bailout, TARP and just about everything in between.

This is NOT a history of the financial crisis. Paulson doesn't really get into the "How did we get here?" in any dedicated or focused fashion (for something more along those lines you may want to read Financial Shock by Mark Zandi). This book is Paulson telling the story of how Treasury, the Fed, the FDIC, the SEC, Congress, the President and others worked together to try to resolve the problems facing the financial markets during the timeframe in question from his perspective. As such, one may be inclined to think of it as an individual trying to establish his legacy. Perhaps it is, but I also found it to be a very honest telling. The book doesn't shy away from Paulson's insecurity at different points, or the impact the long hours and intense stress had. I didn't come away from the book thinking Paulson had portrayed himself as the hero of the tale. If anything, he spends considerable time talking about the tireless work of the numerous people involved.

From a reading perspective, I found the book well-paced and fairly easy to get through in general terms. I think Paulson does a very good job of reflecting the uncertainty and rapid development of events during the timespan in question. He also presents an interesting view of some of the major political movers of the time, many of whom are still involved in things today. We in the public don't often get that sort of thing, as we mostly see the made-for-TV moments of press events and committee testimony.

On the negative side, my guess is that some subjects might trip up the reader who isn't familiar with the deeper elements of the financial markets. The book could have probably done with explanations at a few points to make things more clear for the lay person - like why short selling was so bad, why AIG was bleeding cash, etc. The lack of such explanations does not detract from the main narrative, but no doubt some readers would find them useful in helping understand why things were the way they were.

Overall, I think On the Brink is a very worthwhile read for those interested in understanding how things developed and progressed during the financial crisis.