Doing without Gasparino's The Sellout

Charlie Gasparino's The Sellout has been more hyped on CNBC than any book that any of their affiliated personalities have ever written, and frankly, for those who have that network on 60 hours per week as I do, it may seem like it has been more hyped than Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code combined. For those who find themselves short on time for an abundance of 500-page books about the 2008 economic crisis, I am happy to report that you will be able to do without The Sellout.Charlie Gasparino is like the TMZ silo of CNBC. He may not be a pure gossip columnist, but the fact that some of what he reports is true does not make it a whole lot more compelling than Entertainment Tonight or E! True Hollywood Story. Gasparino is a bulldog, and he has an impressive career resume. I actually thought his last book (King of the Hill, about former NYSE head, Dick Grasso) was quite good. For some reason, The Sellout left me wanting more.There is the possibility that I am becoming fatigued. I have read no less than 10,000 pages thus far about the economic crisis of 2008, and the book I read immediately before Gasparino's was also 500 pages (though far, far better). I found The Sellout to be incredibly redundant, and staggering in its over-simplification of nearly everything he attempts to describe. The book's basis thesis is that Wall Street has been increasing its risk and leverage levels for decades (an incontestible fact), and that Wall Street has been "bailed out" by the Fed and the Treasury before (though despite over 200 references to the Long Term Capital Management escapade of 1998 - no joke - it is incredible how unsuccessful he is in actually connecting the dots to the 2008 meltdown). I do not resent Gasparino's basic syllogism: Wall Street had been turning up the risk dials forever, and last year it all caught up with them. Pretty simple. But the book has a golden opportunity to nuance what this all means, and despite an incredibly long-winded 500 pages of opportunity, he keeps the book as vanilla as can be. Indeed, readers of this book need not be interested in how Wall Street's risk knobs were allowed to turn the way they were; rather, readers just need to be prepared to see Charlie declare war on those he personally dislikes, and completely vindicate those whom he has stayed friendly with.My own synopsis of the 2008 crisis will reflect my own lists, but suffice it to say, there will be some overlap on my list with Gasparino's. He spends nearly 100 pages (or it seemed) lambasting Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch, and I am convinced that the history books will end up [properly] doing the same thing. But Gasparino provides very little support for his vicious attacks on other characters in the crisis: from Larry Fink (the CEO of Blackrock), to Vikram Pandit (the current CEO of Citibank who came on after Charlie Prince was fired), any rational reader will quickly detect that Charlie is driven by personal animosity, and not a delicate interest in objectivity. This is not to say Fink and Pandit are untouchable - they are not - but their role in creating this crisis is a footnote, and Charlie knows it. I would actually argue that, despite his willingness to call them out on occasion, Charlie is far too easy on Alan Greenspan and Barney Frank, and yet ironically, too vitriolic about others. The book comes off like he has scores to settle, and that is disappointing, because I think he has an important story to tell.My impression is that Charlie and I see a lot of this story the same - years of disastrous government policy met head-on with a global liquidity bubble; Wall Street jumped in with eyes wide open, and Greenspan's monetary policy accelerated the fire beyond all recognition. A vast majority of Wall Street leaders - Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch, Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns, Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers - didn't know what in the world was going on, and allowed their firms to literally implode behind their mounds of arrogance, incompetence, and myopia. There are fascinating people covered in the book, whether you find them to be villains or not, and some of those character stories are why I completed the book. But it would have been far more enjoyable if Charlie had written with brevity, with objectivity, and with clarity.----------My ongoing review series will next address David Wessel's wonderful In Fed We Trust, before reviewing the frighteningly bad Depression Era Economics from the frighteningly dangerous Paul Krugman.