As countries get wealthier - all of them, together - you're going to have financial assets. That is a good thing. You could argue the assets were traded too much, or that they're too highly valued, or too leveraged.

If you look at the banking business over many years, it's always been a huge user of technology. This has been going on my whole life, that people have been adding technology, digitizing services.

Japan, Europe, [and] America probably [are] better than last year [2015], not China.

The transaction reflects our disciplined strategy of investing capital in core businesses where we can leverage scale and expertise for competitive advantage. In addition to being a great strategic fit, the deal is compelling financially.

Part of the concept of the euro zone was to establish a common market. The banks were going to bank across all their countries like we bank across states. But that concept got killed for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't get into. That was a good concept, by the way. It may yet return, because there are huge economies of scale in banking. That's another thing people don't quite get.

Their [American banks] big issue will be if they want to deal with the biggest companies, which are doing a lot of business overseas. How they do that is a big question. It's almost impossible to build a global investment bank from scratch. If they want to do that, they probably will have to do an acquisition.

Dodd-Frank and independent actions of banks go a long way in terms of progress on capital, liquidity, transparency, "living wills" (plans for winding down a bank in the event of a collapse) and resolutions.