Philip Arestis is responding to the following questions:

You studied economics at Cambridge and Harvard. What was your motivation to become an economist and was there anyone whose ideas and attitude impressed you most?

You acted as an adviser to the Bank of England later on and to their Monetary Policy Committee.

You mentioned that your function in this bank was to bring academia into the bank. What was the effect? Was it a success or not and what do you think is the influence of academia on economic policy, and monetary policy in particular?

Before we come to the present financial crisis, I would like to ask a question which has to do with your theoretical background and your relationship to the Post-Keynesian tradition building on uncertainty and money. How would you describe your relationship regarding the views of Paul Davidson on the one hand and Hyman Minsky on the other? Moreover, there has been a debate between Basil Moore and you on endogenous money and exogenous interest rates. How would you distinguish your view from theirs? Or are there more or less broad similarities?

Are these models capable of explaining the current crisis?

What in your view are the main causes of the present financial crisis? Which is the role of monetary policy, on the one hand, and which role would you allocate to "misguided regulation" in financial markets, on the other?

Meanwhile we have these massive bail-out packages by the state in the UK, in the USA, in Germany, in Austria. Are theses measures sufficient to prevent a much deeper crisis or what in your view should be done in order to contain this crisis and in order to prevent mutual reinforcements of the financial crisis and the real economic downturn which started well before September 2008?

Let us assume that we can prevent a really deep and long-run depression by means of active monetary policies, but maybe even active fiscal policies. What would you recommend to implement in order to prevent such a crisis from occuring within the near or not so near future?