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There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected.

Although this crisis in some ways started in the United States, it is a global crisis. We bear a substantial share of the responsibility for what has happened, but factors that made the crisis so acute and so difficult to contain lie in a broader set of global forces that built up in the years before the start of our current troubles.

Most cases, I would say, in a huge amount of cases, countries that have worked with us and have used our financial facilities have come out quick... more quickly and in a better shape from a crisis than would have come out otherwise.

Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.

The future is going to require really smart people. What we think are crises today probably will be no big deal, and we have no idea what will really be crises in the future.

There are still deep-seated structural problems that threaten the economic balance in the world: Between the United States and China, for example, but also within Europe. We have taken a few steps toward taming the financial markets, but we haven't come nearly far enough to rule out a repetition of the crisis.

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.

The world economy today is recovering slowly, and there are still some destabilising factors and uncertainties. The underlying impact of the international financial crisis is far from over.

Firstly, economic globalisation has brought prosperity and development to many countries, but also financial crises to Asia, Latin America and Russia, and increasing poverty and marginalisation.

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.