When economists speak of money, they neglect that all money and credit is debt. That is the essence of bookkeeping and accounting. There are always two sides to the balance sheet. And one party’s money or savings is another party

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.

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.

I guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account. And on the very day that he was increasing the attacks on the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, the export sector, he was signing documents to conceal his own money offshore. So the exposé of the Panama money laundering has hit some of the dictators that America is protecting and promoting.

When economists speak of money, they neglect that all money and credit is debt. That is the essence of bookkeeping and accounting. There are always two sides to the balance sheet. And one party’s money or savings is another party

Europe is sort of like the Soviet Union in the '30s and '40s. There was an argument, is it reformable or not? There is a feeling, and I think it's correct, that the European Union, the eurozone, and the euro, is not reformable, as a result of the Lisbon treaties and the other treaties that have created the euro. Europe has to be taken apart in order to be put together not on a right-wing, neoliberal basis, but on a more social basis.

The United States is pushing as policy division of the world into rival currency camps - the dollar area on the one hand, and the Russia-Chinese-Shanghai Cooperation Organization group on the other, especially now that the IMF has changed its rules. People think that if there are rival currency groupings and national currencies are going bust, we might as well use gold as a safe haven.