Andrew Ross Sorkin

American journalist, financial columnist, and television anchor best known for Too Big to Fail (2009), his definitive account of the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History (2025).

Sorkin is a senior columnist at the New York Times and co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. He founded DealBook in 2001, the Times’s daily financial newsletter and summit that became the canonical venue for CEO interviews in America. He co-created the Showtime drama Billions, which drew on his reporting relationships with hedge-fund managers and regulators. His method is archival and access-driven: he relies on diaries, internal memos, and extended interviews with principals, making his books narrative reconstructions of events as they were understood in the moment rather than retrospective analysis.

Core positions

Financial crises are leverage stories, not valuation stories. Sorkin holds that the 1929 crash and the 2008 crisis share the same architecture: prices that were directionally plausible in the long run, financed at leverage ratios that could not survive even temporary declines. The crash’s causes were institutional and political as much as economic — the Fed’s political anxiety about a repeat of 1920–21 paralysed it; Glass-Steagall was shaped by inter-bank lobbying as much as by reforming principle; deposit insurance was resisted by both parties for reasons that, with hindsight, were mistaken.

On the present, Sorkin is most alarmed by the growth of private credit and semi-liquid retail investment wrappers outside the formal banking system. With banks accounting for roughly 20 per cent of US lending, the 80 per cent that sits in uninsured, manager-valued, shadow structures presents a systemic risk he cannot fully map. He favours consolidating the US banking system toward a Canadian model — fewer, larger, more diversified institutions — while acknowledging that community banking’s defenders have a point about underserved markets.

In the wiki

• Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929 — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 269: the 1929 crash, Glass-Steagall’s mythology, John Raskob, and the unresolved risks of private credit