Having spent 10 years studying emerging markets, I know that you have patterns repeated over and over again. A bubble is like a fire which needs oxygen to continue... when you see there is no oxygen, things change.

I am quite international. My background, born in Turkey. My family is a Jewish family from Iran, so I went from Turkey to Iran to Israel, and then grew up in Italy and ended up in U.S. for graduate school. So I tend to look at things from an international perspective, and I think that gives you a little bit of a broader view of what's going on.

I think investing in a good education has been key for me, although the investment was more in time than money.

You have to eventually nationalize US banks, you have to take the problem by the horns. In my view actually most of the US banking system is insolvent.

I'm a rock star among geeks, wonks, and nerds.

I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise.

I am not going to say I told you so, but I did.