Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro examines the 2008 financial crisis and the choices that followed it, part of his DeVane Lecture series course Power and Politics in Today's World, delivered at Yale in fall 2019. Shapiro sets the crash in historical perspective, laying out three competing views of financial regulation and the missed opportunities for reform in its aftermath. The lecture connects the crisis to the course's larger arc, tracing how the euphoria after the fall of communism gave way to today's politics of fear and resentment. Shapiro draws on his book After the Fall, which grew out of this course, to weigh how deregulation, political incentives, and institutional failure combined to produce the crash and shape the policy response. Recorded for Yale's Open Courses program, the seventy-six minute talk runs as a formal university lecture with the professor speaking directly to camera and blackboard-era clarity in his argument.