I am just a normal human being - I am alive! Why is anyone surprised that I am human? Like many New Yorkers, I have a multifaceted life.

I believe in market economics. But to paraphrase Churchill - who said this about democracy and political regimes - a market economy might be the worst economic regime available, apart from the alternatives. I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there's a role for prudential - not excessive - regulation of the financial system.

But in the financial markets, without proper institutional rules, there's the law of the jungle - because there's greed! There's nothing wrong with greed, per se. It's not that people are more greedy now than they were 20 years ago. But greed has to be tempered, first, by fear of losses. So if you bail people out, there's less fear. And second, b prudential regulation and supervision to avoid certain excesses.

I think globalization actually maintains and fosters various elements of national and cultural identities. I don't think everything is being homogenized. If anything, your food, your culture, and your ethnicity might become part of the globalized world, and thus absorbed by other countries.

I think it's true that the 1 Percent or the elite are living in a world of, maybe, excessive privilege, and they don't fully realize how much pain and suffering, how much anxiety exists out there.

In the history of modern capitalism, crises are the norm, not the exception.

All the risky things that were happening back in ’06 and ‘07 are back again to the same level, if not more. So we are in the beginning of a credit bubble, but just the beginning.