Книга: Andrew Ross Sorkin «Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street»

Andrew Ross Sorkin (born February 19, 1977) is a Gerald Loeb Award-winning American journalist, author and television personality. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service published by The New York Times. He wrote the 2009 bestselling book Too Big to Fail.

Career

Sorkin graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1995 and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1999. Sorkin first joined The Times during his senior year in high school, as a student intern. He also worked for the paper while he was in college, publishing 71 articles before he graduated. He began by writing media and technology articles while assisting Stuart Elliott, The Times' advertising columnist. Sorkin spent the summer of 1996 working for Business Week, before returning to The Times. He moved to London for part of 1998. While there, he wrote about European business and technology for The Times, and then returned to Cornell to complete his studies. While at Cornell, Sorkin was a brother in Mu chapter of Sigma Pi fraternity.

Sorkin joined The Times full time in 1999 as the newspaper's European mergers and acquisitions reporter, based in London, and the following year became The Times' chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, based in New York, a position he still holds. In addition, Sorkin started his financial-news website and email newsletter, DealBook, which he continues to edit. He writes a column by the same name (since April 2004) in the Tuesday editions (initially in Sunday editions). Sorkin also holds the title of assistant editor of business and finance news.

News articles

Sorkin has written, co-written or contributed to approximately 2000 articles for The Times, including more than 120 front-page articles and about 150 DealBook columns.

Sorkin has broken news of major mergers and acquisitions, including Chase's acquisition of J.P. Morgan and Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq. He also led The Times' coverage of the world's largest takeover ever, Vodafone's $183 billion hostile bid for Mannesmann. Additionally, he broke the news of I.B.M.'s sale of its PC business to Lenovo, Boston Scientific's $25 billion acquisition of Guidant and Symantec's $13 billion deal for Veritas Software, and reported on News Corp.'s acquisition of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal.

Most recently, Sorkin has reported on the Wall Street financial crisis, including the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the government bailout of other major investment banks and AIG. He has also written about the troubled American auto industry.

DealBook

In October 2001, Sorkin created DealBook, a financial news service about deal making and Wall Street, published by The New York Times.^[1] He started it as a daily e-mail newsletter that provided summaries of financial news stories from around the Web. It was one of the first financial news aggregation services on the Internet and the first time The Times had included links to competing publications. In March 2006, Sorkin introduced a companion Web site, with updated news and original analysis throughout the day. The newsletter has more than 200,000 subscribers. In 2007, DealBook won a Webby Award for Best Business Blog^[2] and it won a SABEW award for overall excellence.^[3] In 2008, the site won an EPpy Award for Best Business Blog.^[4] A Rolling Stone columnist criticized the site for being sponsored by the same entities it purports to cover objectively, including but not limited to Goldman Sachs.^[5][6]

Television

In July 2011, Sorkin became a co-anchor on CNBC's Squawk Box in addition to his duties at The Times. Sorkin has appeared on NBC's Today show, Charlie Rose and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, MSNBC's Hardball and Morning Joe, ABC's Good Morning America, The Chris Matthews Show, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, the BBC World Service, Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and was a frequent guest host of CNBC's Squawk Box before joining the ensemble. Sorkin also hosted a weekly seven-part, half-hour PBS talk-show series called It's the Economy, NY, which focused on how the evolving economic crisis was affecting New Yorkers.^[7]

Too Big to Fail

Sorkin's book on the Wall Street banking crisis, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves, was published by Viking October 20, 2009.^[8] It won the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for best business book of the year, was on the shortlist for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and was on The New York Times Best Seller list (non-fiction hardcover and paperback) for six months. The book was adapted as a movie by HBO Films and premiered on HBO on May 23, 2011. The film was directed by Curtis Hanson and the screenplay was written by Peter Gould. The cast included William Hurt as Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary; Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve; Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner, the then president of the New York Federal Reserve; James Woods as Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, Edward Asner as Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; Cynthia Nixon as Michele Davis, assistant secretary for public affairs at Treasury; Bill Pullman as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; as well as Topher Grace as Jim Wilkinson (former U.S. government employee). Sorkin was a co-producer of the film and had a cameo appearance as a reporter.^[9]

Awards

Sorkin won the Gerald Loeb Award, given for business journalism, in 2005 for breaking news, and in 2010 for his book Too Big to Fail^[10] He also won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award for breaking news in 2005 and again in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.^[11] Also in 2007, SiliconAlleyInsider.com named Sorkin one of New York's "most influential scribes."^[12] In 2008, Vanity Fair magazine named Sorkin as one of 40 new members of the "Next Establishment."^[13]

He is also recognized as one of Scarsdale High School's Distinguished Alumni.

Notable columns

Sorkin argued for a government-sponsored bankruptcy for General Motors in a November 17, 2008, Times column.^[14] Sorkin wrote: "At General Motors, as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs." MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann disputed that figure, featuring Sorkin in the show's "Worst Person in the World segment," stating that the figure was "mathematically and intellectually dishonest" because the cited wage includes health and benefit costs paid to retired workers and their surviving spouses, which are not paid to current workers.

Sorkin has also been criticized by the Times Public Editor twice. His November 17, 2008 DealBook column called for GM's chief executive to be fired. Times executive editor Bill Keller said that he had "stepped over the line" of the paper's standards, public editor Clark Hoyt reported on November 30, 2008.

"Subtlety and restraint are important in news columns," he told me. Business columnists must build a case through reporting that can lead a reader to a conclusion, Keller said. Op-ed columnists have "greater license to write from an ideological viewpoint and be prescriptive."^[15]

The column was one of Sorkin's most popular, and reflected popular opinion that eventually led to GM CEO Rick Wagoner resigning at the request of President Obama 5 months later.^[16]

Sorkin asserted in a column on April 13, 2010, that fellow New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and economist Nouriel Roubini had both "declared that we should follow the example of the Swedes by nationalizing the entire banking system." Krugman demanded an apology for misrepresenting his views stating, "I certainly never said anything like that." Sorkin responded by citing a passage from a Krugman article:

Why not just go ahead and nationalize? Remember, the longer we live with zombie banks, the harder it will be to end the economic crisis.

Hoyt later responded that Sorkin "over-simplified and got it wrong".^[17]

References

External links

• Official site
• New York Times articles by Andrew Ross Sorkin
• New York Times DealBook
• Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Internet Movie Database