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.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with everyday observation.

The powershift began already several years ago, under the Bush administration, when the dollar became very volatile and started declining. That is when China shifted from having almost 100 percent of its reserves in dollars to 75 percent. Some countries went completely out of the dollar. The dollar, for all intents and purposes, lost its special reserve status and people starting talking about a portfolio, or basket, approach as a store of wealth instead of the dollar.

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

The war in Iraq has been very, very expensive - partly because the Administration tried to keep the apparent costs down. But the benefits have been elusive at best - partly because the ostensible reasons for going war were unconnected with reality - no weapons of mass destruction, no connections with 9/11.

When I said "the pocket of the banks," it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.

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.