Trump has said that he wants to remove the tax deductibility of interest. If he can do that, fine. But I hope that Trump knows that it's not the President that sets tax policy. It's Congress.

The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy's debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the 'real' economy's ability to carry this debt. [...] The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.

The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.

We're at the end of long cycle that began in 1945, loading the economy with debt. We're not going to be able to get out of it until you write down the debts. But that's what the IMF believes is unthinkable. It can't say that, because it's supposed to represent the interest of the banks.

When Hillary Clinton said she's going to do just what Obama does and we're going to continue to recover, most people know that we're not recovering at all. We're shrinking.

For many people, the mortgages they took out before 2008 are so high that they would be better off walking away from their houses. That is called "jingle mail," returning the keys to the bank and saying, "You can have the house. I can buy the house next door that's just like this for 20% less, so I'm going to save money and switch." That's what someone like Donald Trump or a real estate investor would do. But the banks are trying to convince the mortgage debtors, the homeowners, not to act in their own self-interest.

So the political choice today is much like the 1930s, when the global economy also broke down. The choice is between nationalism and populism on the right, or socialism reviving what used to be left-wing politics.