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Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I think everyone is very surprised at how 'Matrix' has become the pop culture phenomenon that it is.

The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.

The time horizon may be too long for sole reliance on market solutions - but perhaps the inventiveness of the financial services industry will prove me wrong that point!

In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.

The Matrix is top secret. There isn't much that can be said right now.

At the same time, reading an action script... It makes me wonder. Was The Matrix a good script? I don't know.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

People get into debt head over heels because banks make it so easy to do so. Then the banks come along and act like these people who can't or won't pay their bills are the dregs of society.

Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism.