Allowing short selling is allowing people to sell - instead of having to buy the stock and then sell it, which doesn't do much; allow them to sell it, and then buy it. In which case they can express that information and the idea is that you would get more accurate valuation of companies by letting people express both their positive information and their negative information through either long or short selling.

I think the credit default swaps can take the place of the rating agencies who really have missed the ball in this procedure and are quite conflicted by the way the ratings are paid for. So, I would like to see credit default swaps become an evermore important way of understanding credit risk in the economy.

I don't think the idea of requiring these to be only sold to people who have already own the bonds, in other words, this naked position that the Germans have recently put into their financial regulation and has been discussed here. I don't think that makes any sense.

That is, many times we're not risking our own money, we're risking somebody else's money, or maybe that someone is going to back stop or downside, but we still get the upside.

A lot of ambitious code has been written into the law for those and we will have to see if it actually works, if we have another example of a big financial institution going bankrupt.

We're talking about should we increase taxes? Why not put a tax on carbon emissions. It would raise a lot of money, it would reduce the environmental damages in the future, it would solve so many problems, and it would be a much more constructive thing to do than to think about raising the income tax.

I'd like to see a little more action on the energy side of things. I've been pushing for some kind of a carbon tax for years, and it seems to me we've had lots of opportunities to do it.