Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

If a bank's too big so that it can't fail without hurting our economy, well then, it's too big.

Limiting the destructive risk-taking by large financial firms and banks which are 'too big to fail' is needed.

I don't think anybody's too big to fail. I think the - I think if what you've got is sort of a large number of institutions who are going to fail, then that ends up affecting the system.

The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.

Bank failures are caused by depositors who don't deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement.

It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

We need to think deeply about whether we can sustain banks that are not only too big to fail, but potentially too big to bail.

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

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

I don't want to create a too-big-to-fail player.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

Any bank that is too big to fail is too big. Period.

The only way to make sure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big.

The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

Leverage is great when it works, and when it doesn't work, it creates a lot of issues. So I think if you limit the amount of leverage that people can borrow, or that banks can borrow, I think you'll find that you'll have a lot less issues going forward.

If banks anticipate government will come to the rescue should the credit market go badly awry, they may make loans that would otherwise be imprudent, e.g. subprime loans with little prospect of repayment.

You shouldn't be trying to create a system where no bank fails, but you should be creating one that catches a bank and allows it to fail without impacting the financial markets.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them.

Raising minimum capital requirements [for banks] is expensive. But it is safe.

The financial system is drifting back to business as usual a bit to quickly …. We are starting to see risky behavior of the sort that people were scared of after the crises

Compelling large banks to hold more capital reduces their risk of failure, but as the last financial crisis [the Meltdown of 2008] demonstrated, during a wide-spread panic, investors and lenders lose all faith in the values banks have assigned to their assets, and many mistrust the banks that claim to have enough capital.