The financial crisis of 2008 seriously impacted most Americans. For many, it was a debacle that exposed the policies and practices of Wall Street that were not in the public interest. The destruction was formidable and thought was given as to how to prevent such a disaster from recurring. Can another disaster be prevented?

William D. Cohan, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Freres & Co., Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase, is the New York Times bestselling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Company. His latest book, Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short, is a memoir/biography about four of the author’s Andover classmates. He is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and a columnist for the Deal Book section of the New York Times.

Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a columnist at the New York Post. She writes on urban economics and finance. Gelinas is a CFA charterholder and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street and Washington (2011). Gelinas has published analysis and opinion pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Before coming to City Journal, she was a business journalist for Thomson Financial, where she covered the international syndicated-loan and private-debt markets.