美国债务危机到底有多严重?

How serious, serious is the crisis that we are facing as of two o'clock on a Monday afternoon?

Well, I think it's very serious, certainly for the United States. We have an unemployment rate that has just soared. It's now in real term somewhere around 18, 19 percent - forget the headline number. We have an economy that is going down. We are now into a very very very delicate phase of the economy because we will not have any fiscal policy or monetary policy that can have an impact and yet everything is still heading down.

Fine, but would you agree that the actual downgrade as such was not a major crisis?

Well it was - it reminded everybody of just how desperate our fiscal situation is. It's absolutely valid to point at it and say ”We are in deep financial trouble”. It's not just what's happened in the past. Over the next half dozen years, we have a seven- to eight-trillion-dollar deficit that we have to do something about it and we have a political system that is paralyzed.

So what do you want to do? What do you want, either the president or the Congress to do, because seemingly, every time they speak, the situation gets a little bit worse.

Yes, because they haven't done anything. All they've done is “speak”. You can't solve this problem with speeches. You have to get both parties together to take some very unpopular and difficult steps. But without that, we could have a major downturn in the economy, something that we have not seen since the Great Depression.

Alan Greenspan said today, oh, sorry Alan Greenspan said yesterday he doesn't see signs of a double-dip recession.

Well I hope he's right. All I can say - we are in an uNPRecedented situation and therefore it's uNPRedictable. I happen to think we can have, if not a double-dip recession, certainly a very very slow economy that will compound all the problems we are looking at now in terms of unemployment and in terms of the financial crisis.

So the right in all of this says no tax rises. The left says you can't have this swinging cuts made in entitlements. Are you in favor of some tax rises?

I have always been in favor of tax rises if only for a political matter. The well-to-do –I've got to show that they are paying a part of the price that everybody is going to have to pay. But I'm also in favor of redoing our entitlement programs because it's gonna break the economy as for that we have a huge population of baby boomers who are about to retire.

Which is more important to you at the moment, the debt crisis in America—and when I say you, I don't mean you personally, (I understand.) I mean which is more important—the debt crisis in America or the European debt crisis with Spain and Italy?

Well in this country it is the debt crisis in America. The European Central Bank is gonna step in and do what it has to do. We have a very different situation in which you don't know which of our government institutions, whether it be the executive branch or the Congress, that is going to do what it has to do. At this point, they haven't done what they have to do.