Quotes About Financial Crisis

#1. 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.

Rodrigo Rato

#2. There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.

Rahm Emanuel

#3. These public-private partnerships are very, very dangerous. The most rotten part of the financial system in the US consisted of the government sponsored entities. They really kicked off this crisis. The state should set the rules and enforce them but not become involved as a market player.

George Soros

#4. It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

Matt Taibbi

#5. The financial crisis should not become an excuse to raise taxes, which would only undermine the economic growth required to regain our strength.

George W. Bush

#6. The motto of the old order in the City of London was, 'My word is my bond,' but the financial crisis revealed a culture quite alien to that heritage. The stewards of people's money were revealed to have been speculators with it.

Gordon Brown

#7. Capitalism cannot cause a financial crisis because capitalism is about markets constantly correcting errors. It is government intervention that can and often does cause crises,

John Tamny

#8. A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system.

Janet Yellen

#9. The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money.

Charles Eisenstein

#10. What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

Paul Samuelson

#11. The financial crisis was a classic case of the political class failing the American people. Twenty-five agencies were supposed to be minding the store during the financial crisis and every one of them was asleep at the switch.

Carly Fiorina

#12. The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.

James Buchan

#13. I foresaw the financial crisis. I get messages in my sleep, in pictures and words. I understood that I have a mission and a role in ensuring human existence. I received a message that people would soon start to go crazy.

Shari Arison

#14. No man bears more responsibility for the present worldwide financial crisis and coming depression than Alan Greenspan.

Bill Bonner

#15. The failure to endow Treasury and the Fed with the authority to deal with the insolvency of a nonbank financial institution was the single most important policy failure of the crisis.

Barry Eichengreen

#16. The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

Ben Bernanke

#17. The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

Mark Zandi

#18. Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong,

Charles Ferguson

#19. I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy.

Ben Bernanke

#20. Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

Susan Sontag

#21. The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.

Gary Weiss

#22. Increasing access to federal student loans has been a bipartisan effort in Washington, one that I have supported. But it has created what many experts believe is a bubble in higher education, not unlike the housing bubble that preceded the financial crisis.

Marco Rubio

#23. When the financial crisis arrived, it seemed to me that this was something I had to make a movie about.

Charles Ferguson

#24. While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#25. Because of the way society sets them up, women never again experience the need to develop independence - until some crisis in later life explodes their complacency, showing them how sadly helpless and undeveloped they've allowed themselves to be.

Colette Dowling

#26. At this point, with a financial crisis looming, Lord Revelstoke saved the day by suddenly dropping dead.

Liaquat Ahamed

#27. The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

Alan Greenspan

#28. President Obama inherited a broken country mired in two wars, a financial crisis, a mortgage mess and more than we all probably even know about and has in my opinion brought us back from the brink. But I still see my friends in no better shape and the gap widening.

Don Cheadle

#29. What we call a financial crisis is really at its core a crisis of management, and not just a crisis of management, but a crisis of management culture ... In other words, what you had is a detachment of people who know the business from people who are running the business.

Henry Mintzberg

#30. I'd thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs.

Michael Lewis

#31. We urge the Department of Justice to carefully investigate and aggressively prosecute all senior bank officials who participated in manipulating the London interbank offered rate throughout the financial crisis.

Peter Welch

#32. This is going to be a lot for the Congress to swallow, even on the deck of a sinking ship.

Kenneth Eade

#33. During the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps
let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In it own crisis, the West did exactly the opposite on all three fronts.

Fareed Zakaria

#34. Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

Noam Chomsky

#35. Capitalism has become systemically risky when a single financial algorithm like the one that David X. Li created brought the entire global economic system close to collapse in 2008.

Said Elias Dawlabani

#36. And what if Britain lost? There would be a financial crisis, unemployment, and destitution. Working-class men would take up Ethel's father's cry and say that they had never been allowed to vote for the war. The people's rage against their rulers would be boundless.

Ken Follett

#37. Executive compensation dipped during the financial crisis, but it has risen briskly since, and is now higher than it's ever been.

Anonymous

#38. In 2008, when the global financial crisis struck, it was a bad year for a lot of developing countries, and it manifested itself in consumer confidence.

Adi Godrej

#39. President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame.

Glenn Hubbard

#40. I believe that the root cause of every financial crisis, the root cause, is flawed government policies

Henry Paulson

#41. The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

George Bernard Shaw

#42. Asean is obviously a very important association for us. Over the past 30 years Asean has made great strides in regional cooperation covering a number of areas, although recently it has been under strain because of the financial crisis and other challenges.

Hassanal Bolkiah

#43. There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.

Vince Cable

#44. The Treasury's plan has little for those outside of the financial industry. It is aimed at rescuing the same financial institutions that created this crisis with the sloppy underwriting and reckless disregard for the risk they were creating, taking or passing on to others.

Richard Shelby

#45. In response to the drop in wealth suffered as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis, homeowners and firms did attempt to increase savings in financial assets by reducing expenditure on durables.

Dale T. Mortensen

#46. My daughter asked me when she came home from school, "What's the financial crisis?" and I said, it's something that happens every five to seven years.

Jamie Dimon

#47. During the financial crisis, I worked with hundreds of executives who struggled as a result of their thoughts about job security. When their beliefs changed, so did their emotional experience - and they were then able to focus on the task at hand more effectively.

Andrew J. Bernstein

#48. Fortunately, when Korea was struck by the 1997/8 financial crisis, that was a good opportunity for us to engage in fundamental reforms and strengthen our financial structure. As a result, our financial regulatory structure and regime have been very much strengthened.

Lee Myung-bak

#49. On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

Timothy Noah

#50. Financial illiteracy is like being in a rain storm and trying to jump in between the raindrops ... eventually it all catches you at the same time.

Johnnie Dent Jr.

#51. Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

Lawrence Summers

#52. 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.

Hu Jintao

#53. Combining valuable insights from his experience in China, his time as the World Bank's chief economist, and the 2008 financial crisis, Justin Yifu Lin's recommendations for development policy reflect an impressive and unique personal journey.

Kemal Dervis

#54. I'm quite worried about the fiscal imbalances that we've got and what that might mean in terms of financial crisis ahead.

Bill Gates

#55. If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.

Charles Duhigg

#56. The financial crisis is a stark reminder that transparency and disclosure are essential in today's marketplace.

Jack Reed

#57. We are in a situation with the huge stimulus package that's going to be spent all across this nation and a big financial crisis and banking crisis. And what we need is good, trained journalists who can play the role of watchdog.

Walter Isaacson

#58. The political ramifications of our festering financial and economic crisis have reached the sidewalks of New York, as well as other large and small cities across the US.

Jerry A. Webman

#59. The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

Nouriel Roubini

#60. Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, nine-year-olds would be downing bourbon

Roger Lowenstein

#61. I started out in public service in 1998 after the Asian financial crisis of '97.

Benigno Aquino III

#62. I only wanted to be a good employee who generated as much profit as possible for his employer. I was merely a small cog in the machine - and now I'm suddenly supposedly the main person responsible for the financial crisis.

Jerome Kerviel

#63. I think we will have continuing danger from these markets and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis - [they] may differ in details but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over, until we learn from experience

Brooksley Born

#64. One of the very difficult parts of the decision I made on the financial crisis was to use hardworking people's money to help prevent there to be a crisis.

George W. Bush

#65. The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.

Ben Bernanke

#66. The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

Glenn Greenwald

#67. I ran for Congress not because I was having a mid-life crisis. I left the private sector because I saw a looming financial crisis that was coming to this country. It's unsustainable.

Steve Daines

#68. Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently ... recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.

Alan Greenspan

#69. The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed's lending programs during the financial crisis.

Bernie Sanders

#70. I take great pride in having been able to overcome the Asian financial crisis and seeking the opportunities available to bring about an unprecedented growth in the economy.

Zhu Rongji

#71. The Global Financial Crisis (2008-?); it is not a matter of noblesse oblige as of vitesse oblige.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

#72. It took us years to get into the mess that we got ourselves in at the end of 2008, and it's going to take a while to get us out. We lost eight million jobs, we saw a financial system near collapse, we have a continuing housing crisis that we're making progress on dealing with.

Robert Gibbs

#73. The financial services industry has seemed to treat the crisis like a little rainfall - inconvenient, but no significant changes needed. The real question moving forward is how the industry will respond to Wall Street reform and growing public anger.

Elizabeth Warren

#74. Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest.

Michael Lewis

#75. Economic and financial crisis are getting much more usual, and they are not confined to a given country but they immediately spread all over the world, and you have to be prepared for that.

Sebastian Pinera

#76. Edward Conard's book represents the most cogent and persuasive analysis of the Financial Crisis to date. It is deeper and likely more accurate than what we have seen so far from journalists, academ- ics, and particularly former government officials.

Andrei Shleifer

#77. You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

Bruce Sterling

#78. No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis.

Brad Henry

#79. Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.

Timothy Geithner

#80. The housing and financial crisis could not have occurred in the absence of government housing and monetary policies.

Sheldon Richman

#81. Whenever there is a a financial crisis, it is always the banks that get hit.

Gordon Wu

#82. The crisis in Europe has affected the U.S. economy by acting as a drag on our exports, weighing on business and consumer confidence, and pressuring U.S. financial markets and institutions.

Ben Bernanke

#83. Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and 'zombie' financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.

Thomas Frank

#84. Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.

Seth Klarman

#85. So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work - what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?

Ray Dalio

#86. The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

Glenn Hubbard

#87. Financial crisis is the moment of truth for real collectors and true artists.

Victor Pinchuk

#88. When the pocket becomes empty and the mind becomes full of issues, just think of something distinctive!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#89. Soon after the financial crisis of 2008, I was at a meeting in Washington with a group of U.S. senators. They had invited me to provide a point of view on new regulation; regulation aimed at ensuring we never have to go through the events of 2008 ever again.

Bob Diamond

#90. The current financial crisis makes it very clears that the system that we have isn't really working, and this is the right time for us to undo things and build them in a new way.

Muhammad Yunus

#91. Washington's answer to a self-inflicted financial crisis reminded Americans why they so deeply distrust the political class. The 'fiscal cliff' process was secretive and sloppy, and the nation's so-called leadership lacked the political courage to address our root problems: joblessness and debt.

Ron Fournier

#92. Senator Obama will be taking office at a critical juncture. There are many pressing challenges facing the international community, including the global financial crisis and global warming. We look forward to working closely with President-elect Obama and his team to address these challenges.

Helen Clark

#93. Weakness will persist in part because of the vast amounts of debt governments took on during and after the financial crisis.

Anonymous

#94. Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.

John Cusack

#95. Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system ... Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said.

Michael Lewis

#96. Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago, can no longer be postponed ... We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age.

Gordon Brown

#97. Not every financial company toppled during the 2008 crisis, and some seized the opportunity to take advantage of weaker competitors in the midst of the tumult.

James C. Collins

#98. The current financial crisis calls out for new products and services as well as more, not less, information about what is safe and profitable in the future environment.

Jeremy Siegel

#99. The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

James Surowiecki

#100. The United States is like the Titanic, and I'm here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship ... I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States.

Peter Schiff