The key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung.

America's government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments.

It's not an accident that the U.S. ranks lowest of all major donor countries in the world - that is the share of our income that goes to development aid. Americans will ask whether, because were so generous privately, that makes up the difference. But it doesn't. We still rank far below other countries.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.

It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency.

We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.

The idea that UN commitments should be followed by action is indeed a radical one, especially for the United States, where wilful neglect of its own commitments is the rule.