•Abhineet Mishra: In an article, you blamed America’s deteriorating infrastructure more than the declining finances for the present scenario.

I don’t blame America’s infrastructure very much. For me, the idea that you can have the American dream -- a house, a car -- with no down payment and nothing to pay for two years, when did we ever think we can have the American dream for nothing down and nothing to pay for? We became a sub prime country and we started living on borrowed time and borrowed money and we started making money from money. So, as long as everything was going up, up, up and up, everyone just rode along, even if they knew it was unsustainable. In the world of the blind, a one-eyed man is the king. To me, it was like going back to the Reagan era: you can have tax cuts, you can have American greatness and nobody has to pay for anything. But we can’t be shy about it: this was a terrible moral breakdown at every level. People who never should have been taking mortgages and who didn’t have the income to sustain them were given them. People who shouldn’t have been buying homes were buying homes. People were giving mortgages to people they knew could not pay mortgages. People were then bundling them into huge packages of A B C and Standard & Poors was blessing them triple with As because they were getting huge fees. So, there is a deep moral breakdown. It is not sufficient to blame the complexity of the system. We got away from the basics, basics of the hard work from our parents’ generation, What will our kids call us? The greediest generation? The dumbest generation? The most selfish generation? The brain dead generation?

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