This is the joint responsibility of everyone who was involved in the introduction of the euro without understanding the consequences. When the euro was introduced, the regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital. And the European Central Bank discounted all government bonds on equal terms. So commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate the bonds of the weaker countries to earn a few extra basis points.

There is no doubt that the countries that now have a very large debt have not introduced the kind of structural reforms that Germany did and are therefore at a disadvantage. But the problem is that this disadvantage is becoming even more pronounced through the punitive policies in place.

The hardest thing to judge is what level of risk is safe.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.

The generally accepted theory is that financial markets tend towards equilibrium, and...discount the future correctly. I operate using a different theory, according to which financial markets cannot possibly discount the future correctly because the do not merely discount the future; they help to shape it.

Advocating democracy has, by other people, often been taken as a form of imperialism, and not without some justification. So the important thing in a democracy is that it doesn't necessarily have to agree with what America's interests are, and it doesn't necessarily have to be serving American interests.