It's a sign of the times that whenever a Gates Foundation employee speaks in public, the question and answer session becomes an audition for would-be job candidates. You can save the world and still wear Prada, too.

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Shaping the post-crisis world with an economy on edge.

Gates Foundation CFO Alexander Friedman spoke to the Trade Development Alliance in Seattle this week, offering such a clear, detailed and unvarnished analysis of the market it's amazing there was no run on banks.

The talk came after Bill Gates revealed his foundation lost 20 percent of its assets in 2008 but vowed to push ahead this year, and just before Gates headed to Davos to urge other non-profits, businesses and governments to do the same.

In Friedman's analysis, the roots of this crisis date back a long time. In the 1980s, the current account balance flipped as the U.S. began importing more than it exported. At the same time, Americans started saving less.

Interest rates came down from the ultra-high levels of the late 1970s and early 1980s; largely as a result, home ownership surged from the mid-1990s until 2007. Subprime loans grew from about 6 percent of all loans to 20 percent. And most mortgages, rather than being held by the banks that made them, increasingly were packaged together and sold as securities.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

Davos: a spectacle of wealth, power and debate... but less caviar.

With money so cheap, investment banks borrowed more to increase their profits. Consumers went on a debt-fueled spending spree, borrowing against their homes and loading up their credit cards. When the bubble finally burst and defaults started rising, mortgage-backed securities went from 100 cents on the dollar to 15 cents on the dollar. About $2 trillion in securities were downgraded.

How much could it all cost to fix? To shore up the financial system, U.S. government agencies have committed almost $8.5 trillion, even before the $819 billion stimulus package. That's about half of the U.S. GDP, and the single largest expenditure in American history.

Looking at various financial crises over the last 30 years, the minimum losses from this one appear to be far more severe -- almost double the losses from Japan's banking crisis of the 1990s and triple those of the Asian financial crisis.

Global markets have fallen in tandem with the U.S. What's the net result? Poverty is likely to rise sharply, especially in the poorest countries.

The World Bank estimates 20 million more people will go into extreme poverty for every one percentage point drop in developing countries' growth rate. Overall growth rates of developing and emerging economies are projected to fall from 8 percent in 2007 to about 5 percent in 2009. Robust African growth rates of 5 or 6 percent are almost certain to drop, too. Add at least another 60 million to the 100 million people pushed into poverty by the food crisis

So back to Gates' mission. Poor countries, especially in Africa, depend on foreign aid, which typically makes up 10 to 25 percent of their GDP. Aid has disproportionately gone into education and health, so those programs will be hit hard if it falls.

The prospects for aid look fairly grim throughout much of the world, said Friedman.

United States: Could be reduced or stretched out over longer period.
Japan: Flat or falling, unless aid becomes part of an anti-deflationary package.
Italy: Threatened 50% cut in bilateral aid program..
France: Official intent is to flat-line aid, but internal discussions indicate cuts.
United Kingdom: Holding firm -- so far.
Canada: Flat to negative.
Gulf states: Falling oil prices and financial contagion likely to minimize their role.
Nordic countries and Netherlands: Maintaining aid targets for now, but ministers say that's politically unsustainable if big donor countries cut theirs.

Gates is holding a press conference Friday to call on global leaders to maintain their commitments.

Meanwhile, Friedman thinks consumer debt, commercial real estate and private equity could be the next trouble spots in the U.S. economy. Big commercial banks may not be prepared for much higher unemployment levels and the related defaults, he said. Still he's trying to stay optimistic.

"When you're in a crisis, you tend to think the sky's falling," he said. "When you look at a 5 or 10-year horizon you adopt a more positive frame."

"We're trying to address diseases that are essentially Biblical..." Friedman said. "They've been around thousands of years... so the time frame of two or four years is something we can't let distract us."