On a mid-September morning in 2008, Americans awoke to discover the unthinkable : The nation's financial system was in free fall. How did this happen? In one of the most gripping financial narratives in decades, Andrew Ross Sorkin - a New York Times columnist and one of the country's most respected financial reporters - delivers a brilliantly reported true-life thriller that goes behind the scenes of the financial crisis on Wall Street and in Washington. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, he re-creates all the drama and turnmoil of those turbulent days, revealing never-before-disclosed details and recounting how, motivated as often by ego and greed as by fear and self-preservation, the most powerful men and women in finance and politics decided the fate of the world's economy.