Paul Krugman Quotes

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

Soon after the financial crisis of 2008, I was at a meeting in Washington with a group of U.S. senators. They had invited me to provide a point of view on new regulation; regulation aimed at ensuring we never have to go through the events of 2008 ever again.

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.

The multiple failings of our flawed financial sector are jeopardizing, not only the retirement security of our nation's savers but the economy in which our entire society participates.

I believe strongly that we need a finance industry that is good for the economy, and I don't think anybody would argue that during the eight years leading up to the Great Recession, a lot of bets were made [and] risks taken that weren't good for the economy.

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

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

Too big to fail is too big.

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

Fannie Mae may have conformed to the rules but the rules didn’t conform to reality. A major bank or financial institution could meet every single regulatory requirement yet still be at the risk of collapse.

You cannot have fairness unless you have transparency…We don’t know that is going on inside those boxes … we could have a meltdown [in the entire economy].

We are optimistic with respect to thrifts .... I don't think that there is any cause for undue concern and I would reject any suggestion that we are in the midst of some sort of a major systemic problem with respect to any element of our financial services industry.

I think people have to be very careful with new ideas [in fiancé and economics]. What you need to worry about is when you have something that’s a really good idea, but you get too much of it too fast, like over-the-counter derivatives.

We have institutions that have been allowed to become too big to fail because we had all kinds of flaws in our financial infrastructure, in the whole way over-the-counter derivatives work.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can't get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.

Large financial institutions in this country will always play a role that is essential to our economic growth. But they must only be permitted to grow and interconnect, throughout our economy, under careful oversight and with a mechanism for allowing those connections to be broken safely.

The too-big-to-fail reform project is massive in scope. In my view, it holds real promise. But the project will take years to complete. Success is not assured.

We must learn the lessons of the 2008 crash: no company should be able to become too big to fail.

In the wake of the 2008 recession, Congress and the Obama Administration rightly focused financial regulation on protecting the nation's financial system from itself.

The few effective provisions of Dodd-Frank are masked by its many flaws - flaws that have been and will continue to be detrimental to the American economy and our financial future if not reversed.

The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.

We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

The TARP program was nevertheless necessary to keep banks from collapsing in a cascade of failures.