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.

Unfettered market American-style capitalism doesn't work. Developing countries can't afford that kind of luxury. They just can't afford it. Period. If there's a mistake, they can't afford to put out $2 trillion.

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.

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.

What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.

We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.

We could have saved Wall Street without putting our future in jeopardy. I predicted that there would be all-around consequences - in the long run as well as in the short run. People are now saying we can't afford health care reform because we spent all the money on the banks. So, in effect, we're saying that it's better that we give rich bankers a couple of trillion than giving ordinary Americans access to health care.