Geoffrey Dohrmann, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Letter – Asia Pacific and president and CEO of Institutional Real Estate, Inc., recently sat down with one-time bond trader, now full-time author Michael Lewis to talk about the collapse of the financial market, Wall Street’s day of reckoning and Lewis’ new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, which takes a look at the few investors who bet against subprime loans in 2005, predicted the financial meltdown and made money in the process.

There have been a number of books written about the financial crisis. What compelled you to write The Big Short?

When I wrote Liar’s Poker, I thought that I was writing about a brief, traumatic event on Wall Street. Instead, what I had actually written was a description of the beginning of a 30-year-long traumatic event. I could see how [the most recent] financial crisis was reall