Henry Paulson Quotes

If AIG collapsed, it would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc on the lives of millions of our citizens.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

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.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.

When a large financial institution is allowed to fail, you put in jeopardy hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

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

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

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

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

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

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

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

… many, and arguably most economists were claiming right up to the moment of collapse, that nothing like this could ever happen.

The failure of one regional bank, assuming it is following a traditional model, will not threaten the entire system.

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

In 2008 we came perilously close to killing money, exposing in the process how out of date money's infrastructure has become.