Most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.

In the U.S., you couldn't have job creation with interest rates of 30 or 40 percent. They had a philosophy that said job creation was automatic. I wish it were true. Just a short while after hearing, from the same preachers, sermons about how globalization and opening up capital markets would bring them unprecedented growth, workers were asked to listen to sermons about "bearing pain." Wages began falling 20 to 30 percent, and unemployment went up by a factor of two, three, four, or ten.

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.

China's accumulation of reserves is a result of the IMF's mismanagement of the Asian financial crisis a decade or so ago. If countries know they can't rely on the IMF to help them, their best defense is their own reserve cushion. In a time of spreading global recession, too much emphasis on savings in surplus countries like China can impede prospects for global growth.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

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