Imagine if you could hear directly, albeit anonymously, from the normally secretive bankers and traders who manufactured and sold the trillions of dollars in toxic debt securities that pushed the world’s financial system to the brink of disaster in 2008.

Would they defend themselves and their actions, or show a degree of remorse for what they caused and have not been held accountable for?

Well, you can find the answer to that question in “Conversations With Wall Street,” a compact — and largely overlooked — book by Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell published last year by FastPencil Premiere, in Campbell, Calif.

Ressler and Mitchell worked together at a Wall Street executive search firm that specialized in finding senior people for fixed-income trading departments. They placed in their positions of leadership many of the bankers and traders who ended up causing the financial crisis that we are still trying to recover from.

“In the beginning of the crisis, we were as horrified as anyone else,” Mitchell wrote in the book’s preface. “Just like the general public, we along with many others in the finance world, were outraged and furious at colleagues who had damaged, if not destroyed, our livelihoods.”

The pair set about interviewing some of the people they had recruited and placed in positions of power to “bring a deeper understanding” of how Wall Street works “stripped of its glamour.”

It ain’t pretty. For instance, there is “Sean,” who was the co-head of the fixed-income division of a major Wall Street firm, where he was on the management and executive committees. In his late 40s, his net worth was more than $100 million. He said he saw some risks coming in the mortgage market, but he could not persuade his colleagues to slow down.

“There are a lot of people on and off Wall Street who are responsible for this crisis,” he explained. “One of the main reasons it happened is because the Street got velocitized.” By this, he meant that as risk ratcheted up and became the norm, greater risks needed to be taken to get the same adrenaline rush that bankers and traders felt originally. He likened it to driving a car, first going from zero to 60 miles per hour — “you can feel the speed as it increases,” he said — but then 60 feels normal so you have to start driving 90 or more for the same feeling of acceleration. “But now you are cruising at a very dangerous speed,” he said. “The level of control you have over the vehicle you’re driving is substantially reduced.”

Then there was “Greg,” a senior executive of a Wall Street group that manufactured and sold billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities crammed full of mortgages made to subprime borrowers. Ressler spoke with him in early 2008 as the crisis was reaching a peak. Greg’s boss had been fired, and he was left alone to manage the portfolio.

Ressler wanted to know how Greg could keep selling the securities to investors at par knowing how lousy they were. “I had no choice,” he said. “If I don’t do it, somebody else will. Besides, if we let up for one second, the competition would take the business in the blink of an eye.”

What Ressler and Mitchell have elicited from these bankers and traders rings true to me. During my 17 years on Wall Street, no one ever got rewarded for questioning whether what we were all selling — I was selling merger advice — was right, wrong or indifferent. Our only rewards came from selling our services, day in, day out. We hoped what we were doing was ethical — and legal — but there was no upside in questioning authority or what we sold or how we sold it.

What is painfully clear from Ressler and Mitchell’s transcripts is that the incentive system on Wall Street that rewards bankers and traders for the revenue they generate by constantly selling whatever comes across their desks, regardless of its quality, is terribly, terribly broken. People are simple: They do what they are rewarded to do, and they will continue to do that over and over again until they are rewarded to do something else.

Now, four years after the crisis started — and despite the Dodd-Frank law intended to reduce the risks on Wall Street — not one thing has changed in what bankers and traders are rewarded to do. Until that happens, you can forget about preventing another crisis on Wall Street.