You can't overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.

If the President asked you to help, I don't think anybody could refuse, unless one felt that one couldn't be effective.

I'm writing from New Zealand - a country that decided from the beginning that the War was wrong, and chose not to participate in Iraq War.

Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.

Put yourself in the shoes of one of these oligarchs who has been given a gift of $10 billion. Russia is in a deep depression. Nobody's investing. There is a widespread political consensus that the way you got your wealth is illegitimate.

The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.

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.