00:00The worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987.
00:04The downtraders are standing there watching in amazement and I don't blame them.
00:07We're now down 43%.
00:10Almost everything there completely wiped out in the NASDAQ.
00:13Everything and more has been completely wiped out.
00:16Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate.
00:21Can I get you to speak a little bit?
00:24Yeah.
00:25One billion, two billion, three billion.
00:27You can imagine the American economy as an economic train moving down a track that has no ending.
00:38And it picks up cargo and passengers as we go along.
00:44There's 330 million of us now.
00:46There were only 4 million in 1790.
00:49And our farms are incredibly more productive.
00:52And we have 75 million houses.
00:55And we had a few huts then.
00:56And we have great universities and all of these things.
00:59So we're just constantly moving more and more cargo and passengers along.
01:04And occasionally that train is going to get derailed.
01:08In 2008, you had something close to a bubble in home real estate.
01:1750 million people had mortgages roughly at that time out of 75 million homeowners.
01:22When that bubble burst, it hit home to probably 40% of the households in the country.
01:29These people that had mortgages on their houses.
01:32And fear spread in the month of September 2008 at a rate that was like a tsunami.
01:40Who do you hold responsible for that?
01:44Bubbles are always hard to ascertain the originators of.
01:50There really aren't any originators.
01:52Everybody got caught in.
01:53Some were foolish, some were crooked, some were both.
01:57But you had a mass illusion that it could go on forever.
02:04You had Wall Street firms participating.
02:06You had mortgage originators participating.
02:08But you had the public participating.
02:10And it was, you know, it was a lot of fun.
02:14I mean, it was like going to Cinderella, going to the party.
02:17I mean, it was all going to turn up ice and pumpkins at midnight.
02:20But nobody wanted to leave until one minute to midnight.
02:23And the rush for the door couldn't be handled.
02:27What for you were the lessons you learned from 2008?
02:32I didn't really learn any new lessons in 2008 or 2009.
02:36And I had emphasized to me some of the things that I'd always believed,
02:41that you do need somebody who can say, well, do whatever it takes.
02:46The U.S. government had to do the right things, not perfect things,
02:50but generally the right things starting in September.
02:55And they did a fantastic job, actually, of getting the train back on the tracks.
03:00There was still damage for a long period thereafter,
03:02but it was really important to have fast action at that time.
03:06And we were very fortunate we had the leaders we did.
03:11If we'd had people who waited for all the information to be right
03:16or for committees to work or, you know, that sort of thing,
03:20it would have been far, far worse.
03:23There's, people talk about a fog of war, but there's a fog of panic too.
03:27And during that panic, you're getting inaccurate information,
03:33you're hearing rumors.
03:34If you wait until you know everything, it's too late.
03:41People today, 10 years later, they're still affected by the crisis,
03:47various people in different ways,
03:49but they're not as affected as they were in 2009 or 2010.
03:52Has that confidence come back?
03:55Yeah, but it comes back slowly.
03:56I can understand why people that lost their houses
03:59or lost their jobs or whatever may have happened to them
04:03feel that there must be somebody out there
04:06that was profiting from this
04:07that did it doing some things that should send them to jail.
04:11The people that ran most of the institutions,
04:14the big institutions,
04:16that got in trouble,
04:17I mean, I probably shouldn't name names,
04:21but, you know, they went away rich.
04:23They may have been disgraced to some degree, but they went away rich.
04:27So I don't think the incentive system has been improved a lot
04:30from what it was 10 years ago.
04:36If I knew what the next crisis would look like,
04:39I could probably,
04:39I mean, it might be a little bit helpful in stopping it,
04:41but there will be other crises.
04:43There's no way of knowing
04:44when you're in a situation like we were in
04:47in the fall of 2008 or 2009,
04:50when or precisely how it will end.
04:51You know the United States will come back.
04:53The factories don't disappear,
04:55the farmland doesn't disappear,
04:57the skills of the people don't disappear,
04:59but you had a system
05:01which was going to put them all in an idle position
05:04or could do it,
05:06and there's no way of knowing how far it was going to go.
05:07What's left from the crisis is pretty much our memories.
05:11I mean, the tracks are still there,
05:12the train's still there,
05:13but we had a big interruption in 2008 and 2009,
05:17and now the train has been running pretty darn well,
05:19and we've shown that America can't be stopped.
05:22America can't be stopped.
