In a globally integrated economy, the biggest challenge is to make sure there is adequate global aggregate demand, achieved through spending, when countries like China feel they must save high levels of dollar reserves to protect against international currency volatility.

There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.

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

Wall Street banks have used the same tactic that Bush used in the war on terror - fear - and they've basically said that if you don't do what we tell you, the sky will fall. If you don't do what we tell you, it will be the end of capitalism as we know it. The failure of Lehman Brothers lent some credence to those fears.

I think in part the reason is that seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are.

When Donald Trump campaigned for president, he told the American people that he would be a different type of Republican, that he would take on the political and economic establishment, that he would stand up for working people, that he understood the pain that families all across this country were experiencing. Well, sadly, it was just cheap and dishonest campaign rhetoric that was meant to get votes, nothing more than that.

Trump is particularly unfit to serve because he approaches these without any view of what the truth is, and he approaches these with an enormous amount of prejudice. You cannot begin saying we want to solve the problem when you have a mindset that is against the Mexicans, against Islamists.