Too Big to Fall: Olympia & York-the Story Behind the Headlines

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

One approaches this book with a sense of paradox. So much and yet so
little has been written about the Reichmanns. As their $22-billion
empire collapsed in 1991–2, the media were awash with Reichmannalia.
It was difficult, however, to get a long view of where the Reichmann
spectacle fit in the respective histories of capitalism, business
ethics, financial regulation, and even politics.

Many analysts have since tried. All have contended with the
Reichmanns’ famous reclusiveness and the spongy swamp of rumors and
financial detail that surrounds them. Walter Stewart has probably got us
closest to the truth. Too Big to Fail provides a jauntily written,
broadly based, and credibly probing analysis of what the Reichmanns
wrought.

Unlike Peter Foster, who chose to revamp his 1986 Master Builders to
encompass the “fall” of the Reichmanns, Stewart has come afresh to
the topic. Too Big is thus a more innovative book. It provides better
background and context; details of corporate law and the loopholes of
taxation policy through which the Reichmanns slipped are spelled out in
lucid terms. Untangling the fabric of the Reichmann empire and
understanding its ultimate unraveling is no easy matter. Stewart aids
the process by including appendices on “the empire at its height”
and a blow-by-blow chronology of the family’s 1898–1993 saga.

The book seldom becomes bogged down in the heavy detail of a complex
financial collapse. Stewart adopts a folksy, colloquial prose style that
sometimes serves him well, but he often wanders into an annoying
chattiness. We are amused to see Canary Wharf described as “Disney
World meets Don Mills,” but peeved by the injection of flippancies
like “just kidding” into the narrative.

In a society that sets no ultimate “standard but the accumulation of
wealth,” there will always be Reichmanns. Olympia & York gained its
velocity from the “principles of ever-expanding power and
ever-diminishing responsibility.” In Stewart’s mind, the Reichmann
collapse was “richly deserved.”