The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.

Wall Street banks have used the same tactic that Bush used in the war on terror - fear - and they've basically said that if you don't do what we tell you, the sky will fall. If you don't do what we tell you, it will be the end of capitalism as we know it. The failure of Lehman Brothers lent some credence to those fears.

The national debt will have increased by approximately 50% in just eight years! We will have created a new unfunded entitlement - disability and health care benefits for the huge number of disabled veterans returning from the Iraq war.

I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: "What kind of financial or banking system do we want?" Macro, you would say: "What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?"

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

The country has large unfunded liabilities - social security, health care, and there will have to be some adjustments to these problems. What is scary though is how much worse things have gotten in the last eight years, and the Iraq war is one of the main factors.

GDP tells you nothing about sustainability