Robert J. Shiller Quotes

The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

I'm not panicking, and I'm not scared, I've been through the Gulf War, the Asia crisis, and the Russian crisis.

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.

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

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

The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.

With the lessons taken from the financial crisis in 1997, the Republic of Korea has been able to surmount the global economic crisis rather successfully.

Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

Canadians know that the promise of a recession didn't happen because of anything we did here. If you look at all the causes of the recession, problems in mortgage markets, the problems in the banking sector, the problems in government finance in countries like Greece, none of those problems were in present Canada.

I don't think it's the end of the world even if we have a recession. We'll pull back out of it again. No big deal.

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.

New policy tools, which helped the Federal Reserve respond to the financial crisis and Great Recession, are likely to remain useful in dealing with future downturns.

Some things never change - there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial markets.

I think it is true that, post the global financial crisis initially - and for some period after that and particularly with how the mining investment boom and commodity prices played out - there was a dislocation that occurred in some of the more traditional mechanisms.

It's almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

I think it's been, you know, kind of like a tragic play to this point. But at this point, I think it's clear, and will be clear to the majority of the Congress. I think it's clear to the American people that there is only one countervailing force to a world where financial institutions are trying to sell instruments every day and where credit has dried up, and that's the United States Treasury.

I don't think that any economist disputes that we're in the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The good news is that we're getting a consensus around what needs to be done.

The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

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 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.

If you don't have a functioning financial system the world economy won't be revived. All the major economies have their responsibility to assist at a pace which is required to clean up the balance sheet of the banking system and to ensure that credit flows are resumed.

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?