Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.

Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.

You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

I believe that anybody who gets married should go to a counselor for months before the wedding. I think that's going to save guys a lot of money and the ladies a lot of heartbreak.

Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.

I think the most difficult thing that has had to happen in South Africa for the previously disadvantaged communities is they had to reconcile that the oppressor has been enriched and the establishment is now making five or 10 times more profit than they were during the time the economic embargo was on them.

The public in many countries is understandably concerned by the commitment of substantial government resources to aid the financial industry when other industries receive little or no assistance. This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable.