Any time I can be of help to the government in terms of giving advice -I've given a little advice, actually.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It may be better than all the other systems, but it's not a perfect system.

I mean the whole economy just comes to a grinding halt. Competence in markets and in institutions, it's a lot like oxygen. When you have it, you don't even think about it. Indispensable. You can go years without thinking about it. When it's gone for five minutes, it's the only thing you think about. And the oxygen has been sucked out of the credit markets.

People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.

You get in a lot of trouble when you start putting fictitious numbers on value. I think to just say, we're going to say a dollar of cash is worth $2 all of a sudden, it isn't worth $2. It's worth a dollar today. And I think once you start putting phony figures into financial statements, you get in a lot of trouble.

The U.S. Treasury has got borrowing costs like nobody else has. They can borrow basically unlimited amounts. They can stay there for years and years. These assets will be worth more money over time.

Resolution Trust Company was set up to liquidate a bunch of assets that the government had inherited because the savings and loans went broke. So the savings and loans went broke, the government stepped in, paid off depositors, and now they're left with this mass of assets to sell. We're not talking about selling here, we're talking about buying intelligently. They were selling what they got handed to them by a bunch of savings and loan operators that had in many cases had done some very dumb thing. But their job was to liquidate it. And they liquidated.