People worry that if they buy an annuity and then die before the policy starts to pay off, their heirs will lose out. I tell them, "What you should be more worried about is if you outlive your money, you will have to move in with your kids. Ask your kids which of these outcomes they are more worried about."

I think we also have learned the lesson that we have to have better incentive structures.

If people just put away what's left at the end of the month, that's a recipe for failure.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

he card companies will often, as a courtesy, honor that credit card, but hit you with a penalty. And you keep swiping your card for $3 at Starbucks for your latté, and you're getting hit with a $25 penalty because it's over your credit limit.

The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.

The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.