In the Prologue, Sorkin introduces readers to the central event of the book’s narrative, explaining that he interviewed more than 200 people connected to the 2007-2008 financial crisis in America:

[T]his book […] is about real people, the reality behind the scenes, in New York, Washington, and overseas—in the offices, homes, and minds of the handful of people who controlled the economy’s fate—during the critical months after Monday, March 17, 2008, when JP Morgan agreed to absorb Bear Stearns and when United States government officials eventually determined that it was necessary to undertake the largest public intervention in the nation’s economic history (6).

To Sorkin, this book is a “chronicle of failure—a failure that brought the world to its knees and raised questions about the very nature of capitalism” (7). Ultimately, it is a human drama about the “fallibility of people who thought they themselves were too big to fail” (7).

Sorkin begins by describing the increasing panic felt by Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, on September 13, 2008. The previous evening, he and a dozen other Wall Street CEOs were tasked with developing a plan to save Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States.