Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.

The real estate interests and banks are in a kind of symbiosis. They're the largest-growing part of the economy. This is the sector that backs the political campaigns of senators, presidents and congressmen, and they use this leverage to make sure that their people dominate the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the federal housing agencies.

Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks.

When you say "bank," a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They're the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don't care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.

We're living in a world that's divided into two economies: the economy of the 1%, and the economy of the bottom 99%. I guess you could be more "centrist" and say the top 10% versus the bottom 90%. But there's definitely a stratification at work here.

The result of this anti-classical revolution you had just before World War I was that today, almost all the economic growth in the last decade has gone to the One Percent. It's gone to Wall Street, to real estate.

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.