but for the most part, politicians were extremely uninterested in asking questions about how the financial system worked or asking questions about why credit was so cheap. in fact, the only politician who ever volunteered the word securitization to me before the summer of 2007 was barney frank. over in the u.k. there was absolutely no interest, and for the most part there wasn't much interest in washington east. and i became increasingly concerned because it was clear to me that this scale of activity was not merely occurring or expanding very, very rapidly, but doing so with very little oversight and doing so in a condition where there was almost nobody who was able to understand how the minutiae of the credit world worked, let alone how it all fitted together who was not in some way entirely beholden to the system or who did not have a vested interest in preserving it either because they were being paid by the system, or because they were a regulator and they worried that in rocking the boat too violently it might all come crumbling down. so then, of course, the summer of 2007 happened a