The grand larceny that occurred in Russia, the corruption that resulted in nine or ten people getting enormous wealth through loans-for-shares, was condoned because it allowed the reelection of Boris Yeltsin.

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.

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.

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

When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington.

The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush's Jr. friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier.

The IMF is a more complicated issue. I think there is a broad sentiment among both the left and the right that the IMF may be doing more harm than good. On the right, there's the view that it represents a form of corporate welfare that is counter to the IMF's own ideology of markets. But anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises. If the IMF weren't there, it would probably be reinvented. So the issue is fundamentally reform.