EVAN DAVIS

When a population saves a lot, the funds are invested outside the country as well as inside. If the Japanese invest in the United States, it pushes their exchange rate down and makes their manufacturing more competitive.

Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It's a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.

For me, the main principle for broadcasters has to be that if people stand to benefit from an interview, they should be prepared to face some downside as well.

It doesn't annoy me but I think of myself as a presenter who is gay, rather than a gay presenter. It's a subtle distinction, but that's how I view it.

Mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of.

Now I can broadcast to an audience of several million people on the 'Today' programme. I can talk about the day's news. But on radio, believe it or not, we have notes and scripts. And while we might ad lib the odd wryly amusing asides, they come at the frequency of a suburban bus. About one every 90 minutes.

Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us.

Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don't see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world's mobile phones.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.

There is a strong link between the following three things: exporting, manufacturing and the degree of saving by the population. It's complicated, but if the population doesn't save, the economy will not tend to export as much, and if it doesn't export as much, it won't manufacture enough.

One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there's a 'made in Germany' label on it - they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.

The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.

Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it. And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.

Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects - perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.

I don't particularly like going on about being gay or making a big thing about it, but I think it's a bit of a pain to be secretive about it.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

I rarely come away from presenting the 'Today' programme without some sense of regret. There is always some question that I should have asked, or some point that I should have made. This is annoying but not surprising. Perfection is hard to achieve in a three-hour live programme.

Interest rate cuts have an effect in stimulating an economy by directly or indirectly making someone, somewhere, spend more than they otherwise would. That extra spending increases demand and ensures that we all carry on with work to do, without us having to slash our prices or our wrists.

If you're not making some mistakes, it probably means you're not trying hard enough.

It's not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.

What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don't say everything you think. You hold back on some things.

The Germans are clear about what they do - cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do - electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do - they're the workshop of the world.

The key thing about me is that I'm really not very interesting.

At the BBC we've had plenty of women in good management jobs. It comes and goes but there's been plenty. On air, I think there's quite a bit more we can do.