The global financial crisis is a great opportunity to showcase and propagate both causal and moral institutional analysis. The crisis shows major flaws in the way the US financial system is regulated and, more importantly, in our political system, which is essentially a bazaar of legalized bribery where financial institutions can buy themselves the governmental regulations they want, along with the regulators who routinely receive lucrative jobs in the industry whose oversight had formerly been their responsibility, the so-called revolving-door practice.

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

Countries compete in offering easy working conditions to their banks. In many jurisdictions, you can deposit money anonymously with no questions asked, even if the accepting bank knows that it derives from criminal activities.

America is run by the rich and powerful in their own interest. To an extent that I think is hard to exaggerate, the intellectuals - academics, journalists and so on - are bought off. And that's a big change that happened in the United States in the last 30 or 40 years.

It is for the poor people's sake, above all, that we urgently need more unity and better organization and need to concentrate our reform efforts in order to really to achieve reforms, one by one.

A few hundred years ago, perhaps 85 or even 90 percent of humanity lived below a standard of living that today only 40 or 45 percent fail to reach. But at that earlier time only part of this poverty could have been eradicated, and this at substantial cost not only to the pleasures of the affluent, but also to their well-being and to human culture. In our time, nearly all severe poverty could be eradicated at a cost to the affluent that is truly trivial.

We should condemn as unjust a global economic order that leads to ever-increasing economic disparities - provided this effect is foreseeable and provided it is also avoidable through some alternative institutional design that would foreseeably lead to much less poverty and inequality. Those involved in designing or imposing the existing rules are collectively responsible for the resulting excess deprivations and human rights deficits.