Tom McClintock Quotes

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.

Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.

Like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

In a crisis, markets always look to see who is the next-worst off and proactively begin shying away from them.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

In September 2008, the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down.

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

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

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

We do not want financial convulsions.

In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.

It's better to have the taxpayer pay for the losses than have the United States of America become an economic wasteland. If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

In the '90s, everyone thought we'd solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 - a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe.

The fact that the government had to put up hundreds of billions of dollars to Citibank in guarantees was a public declaration that Citibank was a mess. Making Citibank go through financial restructuring would not have conveyed any more different information. So it's very hard to see why it would have had that kind of a panic if it were done well.

I think Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shared the view that they shouldn't be in the business of bailouts, but you know, you're not in the business of bailouts until you frankly think you need to be.

The idea that the largest banks in the world would simultaneously fail, need government support, government guarantees, and/or government intervention to survive was not in my range of realistic scenarios.

Why is it so hard for the IMF and the U.S. government to understand that putting out the fire comes before fireproofing the building?

Investigating some of the largest subprime lenders - Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Ameriquest, Household Finance - I've seen how their terrible, toxic loans were closed by any means necessary and eventually packaged, sold as securities, and bet upon until they exploded and decimated our economy.

Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic.

I am not responsible for the financial crisis, I hate to tell you.