Prologue and Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

Too Big to Fail opens with a prologue that describes the actions of Jamie Dimon on September 12 and 13, 2008. Dimon was the chief executive officer of JP Morgan, the third largest bank in the United States. On the evening of September 12, he and the heads of several other Wall Street executives were called to an emergency meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where they learned that Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the country, was on the verge of collapse. Dimon and the others were asked to come up with a plan to save the bank.

On the following Saturday morning, Dimon placed a conference call to his management staff at JP Morgan, where he told them that the firm must prepare a plan for the possibility that Lehman would file for bankruptcy...