I understand why political leaders in the beginning want to be cheerleaders to generate optimism. But to admit that they didn't understand the depths of the problem afterwards, I found a little bit surprising.

Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.

We are helping the people that [George W.]Bush says are evil. Teheran couldn't be happier about the high oil prices resulting from the Iraq war.

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.

Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.

Policies seemed almost deliberately designed to suppress new enterprise and job creation. How many Americans will start a business if the interest rates are 150 percent?

This Iraq war has been the most "privatized" war in America's history. It has seen the most extensive use of contractors. The contractors have increased the costs; but they have been necessary - the military simply could not have done it on their own. we would have had to increase the size of the military. But the George W. Bush Administration wanted America to believe that it could have a war, essentially for free, without raising taxes, without increasing the size of the armed forces.