I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.

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 lesson from behavioral economics is that people only save if it's automatic.

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

Credit cards have been extremely profitable to banks. They're profitable not from the fees they collect from the retailers that use the credit cards, that pays the bills, but the real profits come from the interest payments and the charges to users that are unexpected.

Is there a market for somebody selling a credit card that helps people pay down their balances? I think the question is yes. But it would have to be sold by a bank that's really willing to invest in being a trusted partner with its consumers, because they will make less money on each consumer.

Most people start claiming benefits within a year of when they become eligible, although benefits increase substantially if they wait.