The IMF insisted that both Russia and Brazil maintain their currency at over-valued levels. Who are you protecting when you try to maintain that exchange rate by having high interest rates? You're protecting domestic and foreign firms that have gambled on the exchange rate. And who is paying the price? The small businesses that did not gamble [and no longer can afford loans], the workers who are going to be put out of jobs.

Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.

For 60 years, since World War II, we have been trying to create a rules-based system, a global economic system. We understand that what makes our economy function is what we call the rule of law, and what is true domestically is also true internationally. It is important to have rules by which we govern our relations with other countries.

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

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.

The international institutions go around the world preaching liberalization, and the developing countries see that means open up your markets to our commodities, but we aren't going to open our markets to your commodities. In the nineteenth century, they used gunboats. Now they use economic weapons and arm-twisting.

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?