You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.

People can buy the kind of things they consider as normal and take for granted because of globalization and trade and use of supply chains and the reduction of the cost base of the manufacturing of some products.

When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective.

We would not be enjoying those cellphones and those tablets at the price where they are had it not been for globalization, both in terms of trade and in terms of constant technological innovation.

It so happens that because all the economies are strongly inter-connected and aggregated, there is trade that is happening not just from China to the rest of the world, but from the rest of the world to China as well, and that is going to continue.

I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.

I guess economists, it's a bit like scientists, you have definitely fewer women in that field.