When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.