Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book “Too Big to Fail,” which covers the events leading to the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the resultant wave of financial panic that swept the world, reads like the story of the last days of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. In both cases, the reader knows the detailed outcome from the start, but the events are so dramatic, the characters so fascinating and the stakes so high that it is impossible to tear yourself away.

Sorkin, a financial correspondent for The New York Times, spent hundreds of hours interviewing the main characters in this drama. When you read the day-by-day chronicle, the U.S. authorities in charge of managing the crisis look like children trying to piece together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, randomly grabbing one piece after another regardless of size. (Surprisingly, the administration of President George W. Bush left the Treasury on its own, providing very little — if any — political guidance and protection.)

The parallels with Hitler’s last days do not end there. Secure in an underground bunker, Hitler issued orders to a

nonexistent army and fought for the highest post in the vanishing empire. The description of Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld and his circle in the days leading up to Sept. 15, 2008, the bank’s last day in operation, depict a similar agony. Although the  Lehman Brothers’ situation had been deteriorating day by day, Fuld refused to sell the company. In the end, Fuld and Lehman shareholders lost everything when the company was liquidated. Of course, the comparison with Hitler’s court is superficial. The CEOs of the “too big to fail” banks did nothing immoral. There is nothing “immoral” about making short-sighted, ignorant and outright stupid decisions.

The author deliberately stays clear of drawing big lessons from the 2008 experience, except for the one in the book title. Commercial and investment banks should not be “too big to fail” — not because saving these corporate behemoths is prohibitively expensive. The problem is that it sets a dangerous precedent that implicitly encourages other large corporations to take excessive risks and then expect a government bailout when these risks turn into huge losses. Fuld’s fatal mistake is that he held out until the last minute, hoping all along for the government bailout that never materialized. Uncle Sam did bail out AIG and helped to save Merrill Lynch. In the case of Merrill Lynch shareholders, they walked away with even more money than they expected.

Meanwhile, the latest business news is serving as an exciting sequel to all of the books detailing the financial frenzy of the summer and fall of 2008. Last week, British authorities revealed that after Lehman Brothers went under, they secretly allocated more than $100 billion to the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS. The bailout was done secretly because if depositors had known that the state was propping up the companies, it could have easily led to panic withdrawals like the one that toppled Northern Rock a year before Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Now, the big question is what the Bank of England will do if people begin suspecting that it is secretly providing support to leading financial institutions when, in fact, it isn’t? And who will believe that the Bank of England is telling the truth?

Konstantin Sonin, a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, is a professor at the New Economic School in Moscow and a columnist for Vedomosti.