No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.

These debt obligations will simply erode America's standard of living in the future. Money spent to service the debt is money that we don't have to spend on consumption's goods, or on investment in our future.

Countries were told they had no incentives because of social ownership. The solution was privatization and profit, profit, profit. Privatization would replace inefficient state ownership, and the profit system plus the huge defense cutbacks would let them take existing resources and an increase in consumption. Worries about distribution and competition or even concerns about democratic processes being undermined by excessive concentration of wealth could be addressed later.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens. That something else could be a bubble. The United States tried a tech bubble and a housing bubble, but those were not sustainable answers. So I view inequality as a fundamental part of our macroeconomic weakness.

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 problem with NAFTA was with what we wanted. And there, the agenda had been set by our corporations. So what is true is that workers in the United States and workers in the developing countries were often disadvantaged. They were worse off. The big winners were our corporations.

In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.