Lawrence Summers Quotes

The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.

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

Unregulated derivatives like credit default swaps threaten our regulated markets, or indeed our economy without any Federal agency knowing about it.

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.

Hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds have played an important role in providing liquidity to our financial system and improving the efficiency of capital markets. But as their role has grown, so have the risks they pose.

In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.

Improving oversight of hedge funds and other private funds is vital to their sustainability and to our economy's stability.

In the world I've known most of my life, old stories quickly lose their power over capital markets and get replaced by new surprises. That which everyone fixates on gets priced into the stock market quickly and can't drag on.

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.

And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics.

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.

When companies fail, shareholders bear the losses. It's just the way our system is supposed to work.

Whether we vote to leave or remain, there are risks to our future; there are challenges in the global economy.

At some point, there will be some other financial crisis. It's in the nature of a capitalist system.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier.

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets.

A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.

We are taking a greater chance of having another crash at a time when the world is less capable of bearing the cost.

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

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].

Banks are employing risky derivatives strategies to goose up returns….the interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full blown financial crisis.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

Business people across the world are seeing the possibility of Donald Trump being president, and this is a big thing that I believe is inspiring people to put money here in America instead of Germany or other places where we have lot of things going on.