The Bigger They Are, the Louder They Beg.

• Author: McKinley, Vern

Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink

By Liz Hoffman

304 pp.; Crown Publishing, 2023

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management raised his profile after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last March by demanding on Twitter, in a verbose tweet, that the government protect all depositors in the failed institution, even those with hundreds of millions of dollars on deposit.

The government (in the form of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve, and Treasury) did just that. The ensuing intervention redounded to the benefit of Ackman's billionaire buddies in Silicon Valley who were exempted from a very explicit guarantee: the FDIC ostensibly only insures deposits up to $250,000 per depositor.

Ackman is one of many characters that Liz Hoffman follows in Crash Landing, her new book on the government's pandemic response. It offers a wide-ranging look at the cafeteria capitalists who reap billions in profits during good times and then demand government bailouts when their gravy train crashes. Hoffman has worked as a senior reporter at the Wall Street Journal and now is an editor for Semafor, a nascent news website that launched in 2022. Crash Landing is her first book.

The book's subtitle, The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink, stirs memories of the major book releases in the wake of the Great Recession, in particular Henry Paulson's On the Brink. The reference indicates how some of the major characters in Hoffman's book navigated their respective crises during the pandemic and, as in the case of SVB or 2008 instability, begged the government for bailouts. Previewing these individual stories for the reader, I don't believe that Crash Landing is an appropriate moniker for these outcomes because Hoffman's examples show how much the government was willing to "foam the runway" and avoid allowing actual crash landings for some of the largest companies in the United States during the pandemic. Companies that did not rely on government support were also able to navigate the pandemic era and avoid a crash landing.

Hoffman's organizational style for the book is like Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail (Viking, 2009), the leading book chronicling the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. Like Sorkin, Hoffman traces her cast of characters throughout the pandemic, from the early months of 2020 when...