Wolfgang Schauble Quotes

I described the euro as a burning building with no exits and so it has proved for some of the countries in it.

Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.

Today, even small entities that trade complex instruments or are granted sufficient leverage can threaten the global financial system.

It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.

The interesting thing about the China story, getting back to the macro and micro, and as dire as I think the macro story is - due to bad credit and credit extension that makes Greece and Spain and the U.S. look like child's play - when you get to the micro of individual companies, they look even worse.

If you look back to the most spectacular blow ups in history, you can always tie them to a couple things: They were extraordinary complicated strategies that maybe even the practitioners themselves didn't understand, and they were overleveraged.

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

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.

In 2009, at the height of the global economic crisis, it was clear that we were seeing something new: the impacts of the crisis were flowing across borders at unprecedented velocity.

And so it can be very much in the interest of bank A to sell-short bank B shares, or buy CDSes on bank B, because they have exposure to bank B. It's the responsible thing to do as a fiduciary, and yet if everyone does it at the same time, it's destabilizing because everyone is selling.

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

You could be worth $2 billion today and a half a billion tomorrow. It doesn't take much for this to disappear overnight.

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.

Around the district, I've talked to more local bankers who are scared to death.

The Greek debt issue, for example, is such a threat because if that country ever defaulted, it might cause some bank that's 'too big to fail' to actually fail.

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.

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.

Unregulated derivatives like credit default swaps threaten our regulated markets, or indeed our economy without any Federal agency knowing about it.

Your friends, through economic mismanagement (see Greece), can harm you faster than your enemies. And your rivals falling (see Russia and China) can be more dangerous than your rivals rising. If Russia, an economy spanning nine time zones, goes into recession and cannot pay foreign lenders with its lower oil revenues — and all this leads to political turmoil and defaults to Western banks — that crash will be felt globally

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

Markets don't like instability, investors shy away from uncertainty, and consumer confidence goes down in difficult times.

If we leave the European Union it's a risk to our economy - it's a risk to pensioners, it's a risk to homeowners, it's a risk to people in work.

Unfortunately, I think we could see that fairly early in 2015: The cloud of economic weakness in Russia is spreading over Europe. It has the potential of spreading into contagion into other emerging markets, particularly those with large energy companies, such as Petrobras in Brazil.

Unfortunately, slow and steady in any financial market is actually impossible.

You look at the U.S. budget deficit, and you cannot help but feel that this is a serious accident waiting to happen. And not just a serious U.S. accident, but a serious global accident.