Richard Bookstaber, the financial analyst and author who spent decades working inside hedge funds and the US Treasury before writing the book that foreshadowed the 2008 financial crisis, says the conditions he sees today, across private credit, artificial intelligence, stock markets, and geopolitical instability, are more dangerous than anything that preceded that collapse. This time, he warns, the system has no way to see it coming.
In 2007, Richard Bookstaber published a book called A Demon of Our Own Design. It was not a work of prophecy so much as a structural diagnosis, an argument that the financial system had been built in a way that made catastrophic failure not merely possible but, eventually, inevitable. A year later, the global economy collapsed in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Bookstaber, who by then had moved from a hedge fund to the US Treasury, watched it unfold from the inside. He told the younger colleagues around him, people for whom the drama of 2008 was the defining event of their professional lives, to pay attention. "Remember what's happening," he said. "You'll never see anything like this again."
