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And now for the age of risk.

The second in our three-part series, The Crash.

There was exciting you were making money hand over fist.

It looked like there was no return to the days of modesty, of thrift, of penury, of just normal being.

Summer 2007, New York and London were the financial centers of an extraordinary economic boom.

Bankers and homeowners were making more money than they'd ever dreamed of.

This BBC programme, the second in our series called The Crash,

charts the rise and rise of the financial markets for the last two decades.

One man more than any other presided over these years of growth.

Alan Greenspan was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, America's Central Bank, from 1987 until 2006.

Two years into his first term, communism collapsed.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is obviously one of the most critical geopolitical events of the latter part of the 20th century.

But what very few people realise is how significant an economic fact that was.

Within a year or two, we began to see massive shifts in people, hundreds of millions of people actually,

moving from a central plan structure towards an increasing form of competitive markets.

There was a sense that the world would never be the same.

And it never was in terms of the fall of communism and the triumph of capitalism.

But there was also a sense in some quarters that capitalism was almost inevitable in its most extreme free market form.

Professor Robert Reich, the US Secretary of Labour from 1993 to 1997.

...