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.

Gold has no increasing value. And if you're really worried about, say, inflation rising, I would buy Spam. You know, you can eat Spam. You cannot eat gold.

We're essentially continuing a system where profits are privatized and...losses socialized.

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.

The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

A currency serves three functions: providing a means of payment, a unit of account and a store of value. Gold may be a store of value for wealth, but it is not a means of payment. You cannot pay for your groceries with it. Nor is it a unit of account. Prices of goods and services, and of financial assets, are not denominated in gold terms.

In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls. As a result, gold can be very volatile - upward and downward - at the peak of a crisis.