Charlie Gasparino’s account of the financial crisis and its roots: “They were just so drunk on their own euphoria on making money.
“So I wanted to write a book that basically said Wall Street’s embrace of this business model, risk, got itself in the position it’s in now, and what the position was, in 2008, was a severely damaged securities industry, and foreign investors basically owning chunks of U.S. security firms, and the U.S. losing our global dominance. And that was the story, and I thought that was a good story.
“Listen, I’ve been an investigative reporter my whole life. Generally, when you have a story of magnitude, like a Watergate or something like this, you have someone on the inside that knows something is wrong, that there’s something wrong with the balance sheet. What’s interesting about everything that I’ve uncovered about this is that there was almost nobody on the inside that thought anything was wrong, that anybody was wrong…They all thought AAA was AAA and that’s the scary part.”