•Saubhik Chakrabarti: When the financial crisis broke, roughly between September 12 and September 20 last year, what was your first reaction?

What struck me when it blew up was how many people who had bet early on the dips got it wrong. So for instance, the Prince of Saudi Arabia bought into the recapitalization of Citibank a year ago in January. He paid $30 dollars a share. He felt he stole Citibank -- one of the smartest investors in the world had missed it. The Prince may have thought Citibank would go for $27 or $20 -- he didn’t think that it would go for three. So everybody who bought early completely missed something. That told me, as a reporter, that something was going on there. What was going on? I realised that we got a combination of things that we have never seen before. You have never seen a financial crisis that was built up to this much leverage – 33:1. It wasn’t just that financial houses were leveraged, individuals were leveraged too, which is unprecedented: 15 British police departments had all their money in Iceland in isave.com. Who knew that Iceland was a hedge fund with glaciers? So we have never seen so much leverage on top of so much globalisation and wrapped up in so much complexity that started in America. This didn’t start at the periphery of the system, it started at the epicentre of the system.

What we are doing now in America? It’s like Obama has got a shovel that he puts in the hole and he listens -- did it hit the bottom yet? We are praying that we find the bottom. And that’s scary. We don’t even know if we have got it right. That’s what makes it so unusual, so unprecedented. It brings together a cocktail that we have never seen before. So this is not going end that easily, quickly or painlessly – you have never been to this place before.

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