We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

While I am the one who made the choice to enter the ministry, there was a choice before that one, the choice God made in calling me to be his in the first place.

My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money.

There are congressmen in our congregation, judges, federal reserve governors. And there are also people who are homeless and some who are mentally ill. To be able to talk to each of those people is something that I've had to learn how to do over the years.

In the 40 years I've been working as an economist and investor, I have never seen such a disconnect between the asset market and the economic reality... Asset markets are in the sky, and the economy of the ordinary people is in the dumps, where their real incomes adjusted for inflation are going down and asset markets are going up.

American men, as a group, seem to be interested in only two things, money and breasts. It seems a very narrow outlook.

Even if a financial institution rejects an initial application by an individual using a synthetic identity, credit bureaus create a record from the transaction based on the fraudulent credentials. Consequently, the record can be used repeatedly by a fraudster to establish a fake identity used to commit financial and other types of fraud.

The oil areas have a big problem digesting the oil. There's too much money, and the people don't know what to do with it. I'm finding all the time that we have more industries and more success stories which are not involved with oil.