Gordon Brown Quotes

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.

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.

Should that worse scenario materialize, then most probably our propensity to increase interest rates will be weaker.

The world is still in deleveraging.

At many points during our nation's history, there have been times - known in our history textbooks as 'panics' - when adverse conditions affecting the financial and economic sectors of the country have caused individuals to hoard more than they need.

Nothing would assure a recession more than a significant drop in housing prices.

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.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.

At the center of every recession is a serious imbalance in the economy and mirrored in the financial system. Think subprime mortgage and the Great Recession, or the technology bubble and the early 2000s recession. There are no such imbalances today.

Boom and bust is a term that applied to the Conservative years and two of the worst recessions in history.

Fiscal crises often turn into financial crises, dealing a blow to the real economy.

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

Total borrowing has imploded. Private borrowing has collapsed. And, in effect, the Treasury Department is the last borrower left standing.

It is hard to be enthusiastic about the economy's prospects when house prices are falling: Households spend less, small business owners can't use homes as collateral for loans and local governments are forced to cut jobs and programs as property-tax revenue disappears.

There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

It's true that monetary policy was too lax for too long, and the government encouraged lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans.

The Nasdaq bubble and crash were followed by the real estate bubble then subprime crash, which led to the unprecedented printing of trillions of dollars in an attempt to prevent a global depression.

The reality for us in America is that we will never get out of debt with more than 15 million people out of work.

Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled, and thousands of homes were foreclosed on.

The crisis and recession have led to very low interest rates, it is true, but these events have also destroyed jobs, hamstrung economic growth and led to sharp declines in the values of many homes and businesses.

The impact of the downturn is starting to feel very real. House prices and the housing market have been taking the knock for some time and that's affecting people.

Not every business cycle has a financial crisis. Frequently they do.

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.