When Hillary Clinton said she's going to do just what Obama does and we're going to continue to recover, most people know that we're not recovering at all. We're shrinking.

The banks' product is debt. They try to tell customers that "debts are good for you," but the customers can't afford any more debt, so there's no way the banks can continue their current business plan.

Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.

When you buy enough stocks to give you control of a target company, that's called mergers and acquisitions or corporate raiding. Hedge funds have been doing this, as well as corporate financial managers. With borrowed money you can take over or raid a foreign company too. So, you're having a monopolistic consolidation process that's pushed up the market, because in order to buy a company or arrange a merger, you have to offer more than the going stock-market price. You have to convince existing holders of a stock to sell out to you by paying them more than they'd otherwise get.

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

You could say that the vote to withdraw from Europe is, it's really a vote of the British middle class, the working class, to withdraw from the U.S. neoliberalism that has been running Europe for the last ten years.

Oil is a special case. Saudi Arabia is trying to drive U.S. fracking rivals out of business, while also hurting Russia. This lowers gas prices for U.S. and Eurozone consumers, but not by enough to spur economic recovery.