As you have to pay more interest and amortization on what you owe, you're left with less and less money to buy goods and services - unless you borrow even more and go further into debt.

Today's national income statistics make it appear that Goldman Sachs is productive. As if Donald Trump plays a productive role. The aim is to make it appear that people who take money from the rest of the economy without working are productive, despite not really providing any service that actually contributes to GDP and economic growth.

Europe is acting in a very self-destructive manner, but is doing so because it's trying to be loyal to the United States.

The effect of metals speculation was to push up the prices that China had to pay to countries like Australia. This squeezed China. Once the speculative demand ended, all of a sudden the added production facilities that had been brought into production by the high prices went out of production again, and there was a glut.

So the Bush-Obama administration has taken a fiscal stance diametrically opposed to that of the patron saint of free enterprise. While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried. By shifting the tax burden off property and off rent-seeking monopolies - above all, off the financial sector - this policy has raised America's cost of living and doing business, thereby undercutting its competitive power and running up larger and larger foreign debt.

If you increase living standards, you make labor more productive. This is why Asia today is becoming more productive than the United States.

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.