In the United States there are only two exceptions: banks have to report deposits they suspect to be related to either terrorism or drug trafficking. But if your funds derive from trafficking women and children for sexual exploitation, for example, or from illegal arms trafficking or any other illegal activity, then banks in the US are legally free to accept your money and are not required to report your deposit to the authorities.

Our global institutional arrangements - the basic ground rules that govern our world economy - are human-made. They don't exist naturally, nor are they God-given. We make these rules, those of the WTO [World Trade Organization] Treaty for instance, which fill tens of thousands of pages. These words have been strung together by human beings and are also interpreted and enforced by human beings.

Some of the developing-country governments and populations are tired of having things rammed down their throats, but we're not yet at the stage we want to get to, namely where the developing countries join forces with one another on behalf of creative alternative ideas about how to take things forward.

In order to prepare for meaningful change, we have to look at both sides of the problem. We need to examine the output of our political system, which is often very hostile to the poor abroad and hostile also to the poor and middle class domestically. And we must also look at the procedures through which this output is produced.

Each powerful player, or coalition of players, will make concessions in areas where it has relatively less at stake in exchange for other such players making reciprocal concessions in other areas where it has relatively more at stake. Such trades are collectively rational insofar as they get each of the powerful players more of what it wants. But such trades are also dangerous because the whole international rule-system will become incoherent and therefore vulnerable to crises that will continue to become increasingly severe.

Companies are actually much better than governments and other bureaucracies at organizing in a holistically efficient way the extremely complex path from the examination of molecules all the way to the delivery of medicines to patients. Already in the conception and selection of research projects, companies would anticipate all the challenges down the line that they will need to overcome in order to achieve actual health impact. Bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, are notoriously bad at this sort of optimizing.

You can get an ice-cold Coke for around fifty cents in most developing countries, not just in the major population centers, but at the most remote and surprising places. The logistical challenges to resupplying all these outlets are enormous - and yet, the entire system works with incredible efficiency as is confirmed by the price of the product.