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The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, established by President Obama in May 2009, finished its first round of hearings last week. The 10-member, bi-partisan committee is taxed with “examining the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial meltdown.” High ranking members representing all aspects of finance and regulation will be questioned. Among those who testified during the first round are Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs group, and Jaime Diamond of JP Morgan Chase. These titans of industry continued to resist reform or responsibility. Diamond shocked the panel by stating, “It’s not a surprise that we know we have [financial] crises every 5-10 years.” The Goldman Sachs CEO compared managing risk to the difficulty of predicting the weather by saying, “”Everything is context-driven. How would you look at the risk of a hurricane?” My guest Mark Gilbert has written about global financial issues for Bloomberg News since 1998. He foresaw a credit crisis more than 18 months before the crash, but writes that, “Shouting that the king was in the nude…was a thankless and futile task.” Now, after untold numbers of people have lost their homes, life savings, and small businesses, there is a scramble to assign blame. Gilbert’s new book, “Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable”, scrutinizes the past, and offers remedies for our current situation. The book examines the role of fast-paced changes in investment practices, the slow response of regulators, and consumers’ reckless use of credit. Gilbert writes that, “The credit crunch wasn’t caused so much by a confederacy of dunces as by a silent conspiracy of the well-rewarded.”

GUEST: Mark Gilbert, author of Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable