Ben Bernanke Quotes

I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.

The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs - derivatives - exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institutions throughout the world.

If the bankers knew so much about capital markets, how come they got into so much trouble.

That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehmans was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.

Proprietary trading does not belong in banks with FDIC insurance.

Prior to the 2008 recession, many financial institutions were engaging in 'proprietary lending,' where a bank would invest funds for its own gain instead of earning revenue through commission by trading on behalf of clients.

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals.

What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose.

Securitization was one of the most brilliant financial innovations of the 20th century. It freed up a lot of capital. If it had been done responsibly, it would have been a wondrous thing because nothing is more stable, there’s nothing safer, than the American mortgage market.... It worked for years. But then people realized they could scam it.

Banks are employing risky derivatives strategies to goose up returns….the interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full blown financial crisis.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

One of the big problems we had during the financial crisis was the intermingling of banks and holding companies and complex securities.

I mean there is no capital requirements to it or anything of the sort. And basically, I said there were possibly financial weapons of mass destruction, and they had them. They destroyed AIG. They certainly contributed to the destruction of Bear Sterns and Lehman. Although Lehman had other problems, too.

I want to go further, because it was investment banks, it was insurance companies, it was mortgage companies, all of which contributed.So let's not just be narrowly focused on one part of the problem. We have a lot of issues with corporate power that have to be addressed. My plan takes us further and it would do the job.

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.

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.

We don't have sales trading, brokerage, capital lending - any of those kinds of things that got some of the Wall Street firms a little bit in trouble.

Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.

A Fed loan to Lehman Brothers would not have prevented a bankruptcy.

In truth, it's not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.'s derivatives deals - firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Barclays and UBS.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.