Barry Eichengreen Quotes

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

My father's money vanished in the Great Depression, and he had trouble keeping a job.

I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

They were the darkest of times, the years following the crash of the stock market in 1929. Thousands of people across the United States were cast out of their Jobs, off their farms, out of their homes and apartments, and into the crushing depths of poverty.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

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.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

The Depression has caused an emergency more serious than war.

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

Two months ago we were facing serious problems. The country was dying by inches. It was dying because trade and commerce had declined to dangerously low levels; prices for basic commodities were such as to destroy the value of the assets of national institutions such as banks, savings banks, insurance companies, and others. These institutions, because of their great needs, were foreclosing mortgages, calling loans, refusing credit. Thus there was actually in process of destruction the property of millions of people.

I was 5 years old when the stock market crashed; I lost everything.

I've lived through the Great Depression.

I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.

An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.

In the Great Depression, employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial polices changed.

The fear among economists across the political spectrum that was - was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second Great Depression. So, in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.

So I analyzed that and decided I didn't want to be the president during a depression greater than the Great Depression, or the beginning of a depression greater than the Great Depression.

Hey, guess what? Turns out the free market? Not so free. Wall Street was hit hard Monday when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and insurance giant AIG neared a collapse of its own. Basically, if your commercials air during golf tournaments, you're done.

You almost had to live through it to really know the gut ripping misery of the depression during the early thirties which led to labor's bloodiest and most violent days.

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.