The international institutions go around the world preaching liberalization, and the developing countries see that means open up your markets to our commodities, but we aren't going to open our markets to your commodities. In the nineteenth century, they used gunboats. Now they use economic weapons and arm-twisting.

Global demand for dollars has supplanted demand for manufactured goods and services, resulting in multilateral trade deficits and loss of jobs at home.

Governments can enhance growth by increasing inclusiveness. A country's most valuable resource is its people. So it is essential to ensure that everyone can live up to their potential, which requires educational opportunities for all.

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.

We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.

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.

Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.