Mr. Trump wants to turn the U.S. economy into the kind of real estate development that has made him so rich in New York. It will make his fellow developers rich, and it will make the banks that finance this infrastructure rich, but the people are going to have to pay for it in a much higher cost for transportation, much higher cost for all the infrastructure that he’s proposing. You could call Trump's plan "public investment to create private profit". That's really his plan in a summary.

People think of a business cycle, which is a boom followed by a recession and then automatic stabilizers revive the economy. But this time we can't revive. The reason is that every recovery since 1945 has begun with a higher, and higher level of debt. The debt is so high now, that since 2008 we've been in what I call, debt deflation.

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.

When there's deflation, it means that although most markets are shrinking and people have less to spend, the 1% that hold the 99% in debt are getting all the growth in wealth and income. Deflation means that income is being transferred to the 1%, that is, to the creditors and property owners.

The worst loophole is what Donald Trump has talked about: the tax deductibility of interest. If you let real estate owners or corporate raiders borrow the money to buy a property or company, and then pay interest to the bondholders, you'll load the company you take over with debt. But you don't have to pay taxes on the profits that you pay out in this way. You can deduct the interest from your tax liability.

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.

Actually, high housing prices don't help the economy. They raise the cost of living.