The attempt to minimize cost and maximize profits often interfered with our true mission in Iraq. We should have been working to get jobs for Iraqis, but the contractors found it cheaper to import Nepalese and others. This increased resentment, contributed to unemployment, and to our losing the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.

For that to happen, growth has to be very strong. To get back to normalcy, we will have to have extended growth of more than 3 percent. That's not in the cards.

It is a set of policies formulated between 15th and 19th streets by the U.S. Treasury, and World Bank. Countries should focus on stabilization, liberalization, privatization.

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.

I think in part the reason is that seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are.

I think that for the developing world there are many versions of capitalism, and countries have to choose one that's appropriate.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.