Alexandra Petri Quotes
Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
Petri, Alexandra. A Field Guide to Awkward Silences. New American Library, 2015.
The Meltdown of 2008 came a year later and Citigroup, one of the largest banks in America, had massive liquidity problems and in order to stave off bankruptcy the taxpayers had to come up with $45 Billion. The bank executives, as this quotation demonstrates, knew that they were in a very risky situation and that if the subprime mortgages started to default, the “music would stop” and they and the other banks would have a massive liquidity problem. None the less, they kept on investing more and more of their bank customer’s money and making money in what they knew was a highly risky enterprise. The greed clouded their judgment and when the music stopped and many were no longer dancing, the Meltdown of 2008 almost destroyed the entire national economy and triggered the Great Recession where the overwhelming proportion of Americans had to suffer for the greed of those who could not “stop dancing” even as they knew it was very dangerous.
Alexandra Petri is an American humorist and newspaper columnist. In 2010, she became the youngest person to have a column in The Washington Post. Petri runs the ComPost blog on the paper's website, on which she formerly worked with Dana Milbank. In 2017, a piece of satire she wrote about president Donald Trump was miscategorized as news and included in one of the White House's daily press briefings. She was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018.
