Of course, speculation will always make a crisis worse. If there is a weak point, it will expose it.

I am for maximum supervision and minimum regulation.

The lower interest rates fueled housing and consumption booms in countries such as Spain and Ireland. At the same time, Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, tightened its belt and became more competitive. All this led to a wide divergence in economic performance. Europe became divided into creditor and debtor countries.

To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.

The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposite position. I assume that markets are always wrong.

At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable. Once the economy begins to recover, you have to balance the budget. But it will also need additional revenues. Should the government not receive them, we will all get punished with higher interest rates.

In certain circumstances, financial markets can affect the so-called fundamentals which they are supposed to reflect. When that happens, markets enter into a state of dynamic disequilibrium and behave quite differently from what would be considered normal by the theory of efficient markets. Such boom/bust sequences do not arise very often, but when they do, they can be very disruptive, exactly because they affect the fundamentals of the economy.