cases he is a tragic person. not a tragic hero. >> he is either shockingly naive, not very intelligent, or he is willfully now pretending he is such. >> i think wall street, these people are professional traders. they always believe there's one last trade to be made. there's one more card that they can play, and i think that dick fuld felt he had one more card. did he know that he had taken on too much risk? i think he did. did he think it was going to be the end of him and our country and the global economy? no. >> let me ask you a hard question, because you're a top reporter for a top newspaper imersed in wall street and business. did you see what happened coming in any way? >> honest answer, i didn't. i didn't -- i don't want to say that i didn't see that we were going to have problems. i did. i wrote articles saying that there were going to be problems. did i think that we were going to be on the edge of -- did i think we were going to see a bank like lehman brothers go under, that aig was going to almost falter and we're going to be living in this 9%, 10% world