The longer you wait, the less fun. If you wait until the bitter end, the whole economy can be destroyed.
We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.
Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world.
The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.
The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view.
We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.
In the early 1990s, when a lot of the developing world opened up to international capital flows... they ended up in very good long-term projects, but projects that weren't going to pay off for five or 10 or 20 years.
In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better.
The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty.
The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.
The runs started in Thailand after the IMF intervened in such a dramatic way. Then the IMF came to Indonesia.
I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.
We were proposing, in a sense, that the rest of the world be made safe for American ideas, as they adopted intellectual property rights that gave patent protection to our very innovative economy.
The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.
Let's start fresh with Russia on some real help and some real reform.
We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program.
In my view, there is an urgent need to communicate with the public and help to explain where there is consensus, and where are there doubts about the issues of sustainable development.
