This interview is a worthwhile read, but something strikes me about the first question:

Q Your most recent book blames the 2008 financial crisis, like the crash of the 1920s, on the income gap between the very rich and the rest of society. Will it happen again?

A It’s unbelievable how no lessons seem to have been learned from that terrible crash. The evidence we point to in the book suggests that when the concentration of wealth at the top reaches extreme levels, as it has in North America recently and did in the 1920s, it creates financial instability, leading to a crash.

I think we have a hopeful tendency to excuse malice as ignorance, the actions of power as unfortunate accident. In the context of the United States, there's no evidence that we as a society didn't learn lessons from the Great Depression and the preceding years of excess - the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act points rather clearly to an understanding of the role finance played in that crisis. The repeal of that and other legislation meant to safeguard us from runaway wealth stems not from a collective unlearning of these lessons, but instead the concerted efforts of those same powerful institutions of wealth that benefited most from our public bailouts when the resulting system collapsed.

By the time Gramm-Leach-Bliley passed in 2001, it was probably too late for our learning or ignorance to have mattered too much - the wealthiest few were by then so enriched, holding such powerful sway over our levers of government, that collective knowledge of our history and its causes would be meaningless. Those at the suffering end of this unequal system have long been warning of its perils, but they have scarce chance of converting that awareness into policy. Rather than posit the downfall of our system as the failure of our elites to hear this message, though, it bears considering whether it reflects instead the successful pursuit of their intended program.