Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When Vanity Fair magazine excerpted this book last month, I printed out the article and eagerly began reading. On page one, I realized I'd just wasted paper. The bottom of that page contained this incredible error in a description of Henry Paulson's worries at the depths of the financial crisis: "...Treasury bills were trading for under 1 percent interest, as if they were no better than cash, as if the full faith of the government had suddenly become meaningless." The identical phrase is also found on page 417 of this book (though Amazon reports this as page 425). For the uninitiated, the fact that Treasury yields had fallen to less than 1 percent was a sign that government debt was seen as a safe haven -- that the full faith of the government had suddenly become the _only_ thing that was meaningful during the crisis. As money piled into Treasuries, their yields fell, reflecting their safety. This is not an incidental bit of trivia. The fact that the federal government can continue to borrow very cheaply has been a very lucky break for the United States, allowing us to fund things like bailouts and fiscal stimulus instead of imposing austerity as other countries in similar situations are usually forced to do. Economist Dean Baker and many others have expressed their bafflement at Sorkin's misunderstanding here. It's hard to believe it's an editing error, and Sorkin has written some other howlers in the New York Times. The most likely explanation is that he doesn't understand the relationship of yields to prices for bonds, and for a financial reporter for a major newspaper, this is appalling.