From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm going to ask you to do something right now.

Cast your mind back 10 years ago to the fall of 2008, the campaign debates between John McCain and Barack Obama are going on.

And in the headlines, it seemed that life in America was hanging in the balance.

We saw financial market turmoil reach a new level last week and spilled over into the rest of the

economy. We must now take further decisive action to fundamentally and comprehensively

I had covered the Iraq war. I spent a year in Baghdad. I would say in many ways that week

felt scarier. And then I'd go out and everyone's just going shopping, walking down the

street. Nobody has any idea that their fundamental way of life is really hanging by a thread.

Adam Davidson is now a staff writer at The New Yorker, but during the housing crisis and the

market crash of 2008,

he was the co-host of NPR show Planet Money. He recently revisited that critical, terrifying,

decisive moment with Hank Paulson. Paulson then was Treasury Secretary under George Bush.

For you and I, we both, we lived in that crisis second by second, and it's

seared in our brains, I think. You know, that week of September 15th, you could, you know,

what was happening Thursday at three, and I could probably tell you. And as everything was

collapsing, it was Paulson's job basically to save the world. Yeah, yeah, I describe it sometimes the week that Lehman went down and we had to step in and

prevent a very disastrous failure of AIG from happening.

And if we'd had one more institution go down, we would have been looking, you know, into something

I think that could have rivaled or exceeded the Great Depression.

You know, I didn't have time to be afraid during the day, but at night when I would wake up,

I was looking into the abyss because the system was so concentrated that if the system had collapsed,

...