Crisis: The Book

Leon Neyfakh reports that Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean are putting together a proposal for what Nocera calls "a book for the ages" on the financial crisis. And they're not the only journalists writing a book on this subject: Neyfakh mentions Andrew Ross Sorkin, Roger Lowenstein, Kate Kelly, Charlie Gasparino, Gillian Tett, Michael Lewis, Daniel Gross, and David Wessel as others in various stages between pitching and finishing books. I'd add Portfolio's own Duff McDonald to the list, too.

But the really big book, the one which everyone's going to want, is Paulson's.

Paulson will be unemployed come January, and has been right in the middle of every major event of the credit crisis. Obviously he doesn't need the money, although his advance would surely be stratospheric. But he does have the ego; my feeling is that he'll do the same thing as his predecessor Bob Rubin, find a very high-rent co-writer to share the drudge work, and put out his side of the story. And I'll be very interested to read it.

Meanwhile, that list of journalists comprises something of an all-star financial-journalism roster: the industry would suffer if they all went on book leave at once. And I can only imagine what Graydon Carter thinks of McLean disappearing off to write a book just two months after she started work at Vanity Fair. What's more, if Sorkin does disappear to write a book, I somehow doubt that he would return to the NY Times afterwards. We've already seen the financial crisis rejigger the architecture of Wall Street; it might end up doing something similar for financial journalism, too.