either of those things by law. FN: Throughout your book there is a long list of people [Edward Gramlich, Josh Rosner, Donna Tanoue and Brooksley Born to name a few] who foresaw that some kind of disaster was on the horizon. Why were they ignored? BM: It speaks to a fundamental imbalance between the voices of consumers and the voices of industry. I think it gets to a deeper issue which is the notion of what is corruption. There's explicit corruption and implicit corruption. I don't think there's a whole lot of explicit corruption. What I mean by implicit corruption is people who think the same way and so you don't need to exchange favours because you already agree with each other and the problem during most of the crisis years is that the regulators and the politicians thought like the industry and so you didn't need bribery. FN: Do you think it will be back to business-as-usual once we're through the crisis? BM: I think that what's happening in Europe now is a continuation of the crisis. I'm not sure that people or governments are inclined to change but I think the markets are forcing change. And I think that's going to happen in the US as surely as it's happening in Europe and if it doesn't happen in the US, the market will force it at some point. So I don't think it can continue as it was, not because of the politicians but simply because it can't.