CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo had her first live broadcast on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange fifteen years ago. NYSE Euronext celebrated the anniversary with Ms. Bartiromo ringing the opening bell this morning. I had the honor to join Maria and other CNBC colleagues on the podium.

Today - the tables are turned, I get to interview Maria Bartiromo. For Maria, it’s been an “amazing” and “emotional” time as she took me back over the years.

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MARIA: I'm thinking back to so many different memories that I've had over the 15 years, and I'm so grateful to have really been at the apex, the nucleus of global finance for all of this time.

And, you know, it's amazing I don't know where 15 years has gone. Over the 15-year period I've been fortunate to be able to see so many different things like the explosion of the individual investor, where individuals – 15 years ago, felt empowered to invest on their own because they were empowered by so much information.

The second major trend that I watched from this front row seat was globalization, where one thing would happen in one corner of the world, and it would trigger reactions all over the world. We learned, certainly over the last 15 years, that the world is connected, and companies are looking all over the world for business, and populations are exploding in places like China and India.

Bill Stahl Jr. | NY Daily News Archive | Getty Images

Another major trend was the boom and then the bust in dot-com.

And I remember in the '90s when I was broadcasting on the floor and anything that had a dot-com at the end of its name was bid up and was celebrated.

We were entering a new era back then.

We were entering the year 2000, back in 1998 and 1999, and people felt like it was going to be really different.

We put different assumptions in front of us to measure the health of companies. We didn't even think about earnings or revenue growth. We were talking about hits to the Web sites and dot-com metrics. And, of course, that all blew up in our face when we had the bust in dot-com.

We also had the boom and the bust in oil, where we fell into another bubble-like mentality, where oil rallied all the way up to $147 a barrel because there was demand from the global economies because there's globalization. We fell into this idea that just because a market was going up it would continue to go up. When oil was at 147, I remember Goldman Sachs came out with a report, said it's going to 200. Of course, the next stop, all the way down, was $32 a barrel.

The biggest of them all was the financial collapse and the boom and the bust in housing, when home prices surged for no real reason other than an urgency that was in the market and this, again, this bubble-like theory where prices in, you know, pick any market—Phoenix, prices for homes were up 40 percent year over year. I mean, you know, was there any real reason for prices to be up 40 percent in Phoenix? Was the school system better? Was infrastructure better? You know, was population growth happening? No, none of that. There was just this urgency to get in on a market that was bubbling up. And then, of course, we had the bust, which led to the financial collapse.

LULU: There's been a global consolidation of exchanges around the world that's no longer just the New York Stock Exchange, but more of the NYSE Euronext combination, and other exchanges becoming global powerhouses.

MARIA: I think that's a result of globalization because companies want to be able to transact anywhere in the world.

If you're in Germany, you want to make sure that you can do business across the continent.

And if you're in Singapore, you want to ensure that you're doing business not only in America, but also in Southeast Asia.

As a result of globalization and business booming all around the world and this stock market mentality booming all around the world with individuals empowered, you had consolidation.

Getty Images Maria Bartiromo on NBC's Meet The Press

And you had, you know, so many exchanges globally teaming up.

Today you've got so many hubs of the world, whether it's Moscow or Dubai or, you know, Bahrain or Singapore, trying to be the financial hubs.

London for a little while overtook the US in terms of a major financial hub.

So you have transactions happening all around the world, and business consolidating to accommodate that.