One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explainingfinance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.
The modern finance industry is at a loss when it comes to justifying its own existence. Its finest minds can’t explain why we wouldn’t be better off with a much simpler and more heavily circumscribed model of capital formation. Sorkin likewise can’t make his readers fully grasp why the current system—which turns large amounts of other people’s money and even more people’s debt into huge paper fortunes for a small super-elite, and in such a way as to regularly imperil the entire worldwide economic order—is beneficial or necessary. But the New York Times and Wall Street each need him to try.
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