“1000 percent or more of GDP, so that every economy starts to have financial systems that resemble recent cases like Switzerland, Ireland, Iceland, or Cyprus. That might be a very fragile world to live in.”

It’s just very hard to teach a class of students about what has happened in the Global Financial Crisis.

And we have never observed modern finance-capitalist systems operating over a sustained period at this kind of credit-to-GDP leverage ratio.

Eventually the banking systems of all advanced economies reach magnitudes of 500 percent,

More financial instability will introduce more uncertainty all down the line.

We have never in human history seen a run-up in credit of the kind we have just witnessed in advanced economies since 1970.

We may end up with a world based more on equity than debt, or more on market debt instruments than bank intermediation; but how and why we get there is a mystery.

A possibility is that we see more and more leverage, and credit-to-GDP ratios rise once more to even higher levels.

If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises – like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s.

Non-trivial understanding of the financial sector, credit, and the banking system.

The basic aggregate measure of gearing or leverage is telling us that today’s advanced economies’ operating systems are more heavily dependent on private sector credit than anything we have ever seen before.

How we ended up there and how we got to where we are today, without having some basic.

Then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.

Absent significant regulatory or tax changes, and a sharp transition could be disruptive.

To the security of employment at working age, to the challenge of accumulating for retirement.

In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all.

Macroeconomic stability will be more elusive and that will affect all of our lives: from the risks many will face in childhood.

The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.

We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.

In art economy is always beauty.

The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose dominion is the entire African continent.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

Health care is one-sixth of our economy. If the government can control that, they can control just about everything. We need to understand what is going on, because there are much more economic models that can be used to give us good health care than what we have now.

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.