Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.

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

As a rich country, we can, in some sense, "afford" the war. But spending money on the war means that we are not spending money on other things that we could have spent the money on.

I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: "What kind of financial or banking system do we want?" Macro, you would say: "What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?"

You saw on your TV what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Reserves or National Guard are usually the people we use for those national emergencies. They weren't here, they were over in Iraq, and so we were less protected.

The momentum today behind the idea of a new global reserve currency reflects, in effect, the rise of the rest in world politics and economics, led by China.