Bankers were scapegoats for the whole Reagan-Thatcher era, which exalted finance and humbled industry, and which had allowed the fruits of progress to accrue disproportionately to the rich and super-rich.

You do just have to go back to moral philosophy and you've got to say, okay, there is greed, people do want more and more, but then what restrains them and what restrained them in the past was a view of life in which one's satisfaction wasn't the most important thing, that you just, you needed enough and you could say, "Enough is enough." Maybe religion will get you there, maybe just classic moral philosophy, but you have to have some of that, or else you're always on the gravy train.

Americans feel as though the only position they can possibly occupy is number one and if they're not number one, well, the end of the world has come.

Investors are trying to work out some risk premiere that have some correspondence with actual risks. But they don't, they're not, they can't go very far that way, because the actual correspondence isn't really there in a lot of cases. So once people stop believing in these stories, and then the crash can come very, very quickly. They believe that house prices are correctly priced for some time and then suddenly they realized there's no real basis for that. But what is the correct price? We don't know that either. It's just that everything swings.

It's not enough say, "Look, bankers were immensely greedy and that they committed lots of frauds." I mean, that's not, they were set free, that sort of particular proclivity in human nature was set free to do its best and its worst. Politicians and regulators are consumers of ideas. They never have any ideas of their own, it would take too much like hard work to develop ideas, you get them off menus and you pick the ones that suit you. Financial services were set free to go beyond their rightful place, a place by which they have been restrained in the past.

Bankers were scapegoats for the whole Reagan-Thatcher era, which exalted finance and humbled industry, and which had allowed the fruits of progress to accrue disproportionately to the rich and super-rich.

There's no automatic mechanism in a market system that reconciles the desire to save and the desire to invest. And therefore, the government has to sort of do something or the Federal Reserve, the Fed, or the Central Bank, or whatever, it has to intervene. It has to create enough investment for the economy not to suffer from a fall in aggregate demand. So, if you don't have a balance within the market system itself, then you need an external balance and that's what I think Keynes believed.