When you say "paying the banks," what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.

Economists often define their discipline as "the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends." But when resources or money really become scarce, economists call it a crisis and say that it's a question for politicians, not their own department.

You could say that the vote to withdraw from Europe is, it's really a vote of the British middle class, the working class, to withdraw from the U.S. neoliberalism that has been running Europe for the last ten years.

No price is too high to pay to try to make the financial system go on a little bit longer. But ultimately it can't be saved, because of the mathematics that are involved.

In order to be an economist these days, you have to participate in this fairytale that somehow we can recover and still make the banks rich. And it is a fairytale.

In real estate you can avoid ever having to pay a capital gains tax, decade after decade, century after century. When you sell a property and make a capital gain, you simply turn around and buy a new property. The gain is not taxed. It's called "preserving your capital investment" - which goes up and up in value with each transaction.

I think we're in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.