gretchen morgenson was more port of the decade. now she shows how american taxpayers were suckered by the shenanigan greed, back scratching and guile of financial and political elites who swarm like vultures around fannie mae picking it clean of oversight and accountability while its executives gourd themselvess on the spil spoils. a lon sentence there but very nice. >> rose: >> charlie of course there have been so many books written about it but four years after the crisis erupted in 2007 we don't know the half ofit so what this book is trying to do is first of all to assign some countabili. many of e books that we've read up until now have been sort of these ideas about this being a an actof god. well, this was an act o man or men or men and women. this was not somethinghat just happened. so identifying the cast of characters, identifying people who will have sort of slipped from the scene without really having been as participants is useful. i think it's extremely important to be able to say this is what happens. this is why it

>> up next gretchen morgenson and joshua rosner talk about the 2008 u.s. financial collapse and the role played by lending and mortgage companies fannie mae and but. this lasts about an hour. >> thank you so much, david. .. >> from interviewers, buyers of the book, e-mail in my e-mail account at the times. what surprised you the most about your reporting and the investigation that you both did to come out with this book? we all know that there have been a lot of books about the financial crisis. many of them recount the events during the crisis in the heat of the panic of 2008. some of them go back a little bit further in time to describe some of the groundwork that was laid to create the crisis. but josh and i decided to go back much farther, into the early '90s, to really tell the tale. because a debacle this large really didn't happen overnight. and unlike some of the books' conclusions, other books' conclusions that it was nobody's fault, sort of a series of events that could not be helped, we really believe that there were actual parties involved layi

and gretchen morgenson and joshua rosner will answer your questions. >> i want to play devil's advocate. there are agencies that regulate fannie and freddie was suppose hypothetically you could minister the agency what would you do with the implementation? >> the regulators that were charged the years leading up to the crisis were neutralized they understood how to coopt congress says they could by congress and have everything under control but this regulatory structure was a 98-pound weakling and was punished whenever ofheo tried to talk about safety and soundness soundness, it was drummed out of town they would say we don't have safety and soundness issue. we need housing. it was not regulated well because of the very proactive tactics of fannie mae and freddie mac so looking back you cannot say we have a good regulatory structure. i think you have to have an adversarial relationship and when we interviewed barney frank for the book, we ask him why are you taking the side of the company all these years when you could have been helping the regulator do its job? he said i felt there bec