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.

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.

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.

To save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.

If you have to pay about forty to forty-three percent of your income for housing, you also have to pay fifteen percent of your paycheck for the FICA for Social Security wage withholding. You have to pay medical care, you have to pay the banks for your credit card debt, student loans. Then you only have about twenty-five or thirty-five percent, maybe one-third of your salary to buy goods and services. That's all.

To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.

That's why Apple, Microsoft and the big information technology companies have kept so much money registered abroad (although in US dollar accounts with a nominal foreign address's owner). They pretend to make their global income in Ireland. They have an office, which could be simply a postal drop box in Ireland, and claim to make all their money there, not in America.