Henry Paulson Quotes

When the economy gets wobbly, people pay attention to the leadership failures.

Europe has, to put it mildly, been in a poor state since the transition to the 21st century. This is down to national issues, European missteps, and an economic and financial crisis that crashed down on us with enough force to dislodge the essential European idea.

I'm not really a political animal but I am rather fascinated by the meltdown of England and America. In the end, it seems as if America might come out of it, but I'm not sure if England is ever going to recover.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

I don't think Albert Einstein could have devised an equation to guide the leader of the free world during the wildly tumultuous post-9/11 realities without a modicum of help from the opposition party and the vast majority of the print and electronic media.

Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

The important thing is that we recognize our President's leadership, that he is not saying: I am going to walk away from this. He is saying: I am going to do the right thing.

Many other countries in this world are in a difficult situation, and all the Thai people are probably worried about the fate of Thailand: whether the country would survive or not.

I don't want to talk in terms of miracles. I think this is a very serious situation. But I do want to talk in terms of Bush becoming a man of the hour, and I think this is way to do it.

The American people have made it abundantly clear that they want less government, not more. They want problems solved in a bipartisan manner, not the creation of new problems.

The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

You could say that bad typography brought us the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the housing crisis and a good number of other things.

The right-wing of the Republican party isn't so much a political agenda as a plea for help.

When I took over, the economy had almost collapsed. I told Malawians we needed to pass through difficult times. Two days ago I even cut my own salary by 30% to show we are making sacrifices.

Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and 'zombie' financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.

Life has become terribly insecure. It's on the vortex of civil war. It's difficult to know how America will bring it back from the brink and build up good will.

There's a lot of strength in the U.S., but there's a lot of froth also. The froth will blow off. We're going to have to face up to some realities that we're not fully facing up to right now.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

What Obama is saying is simple: The United States has become Too Big To Fail.

There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.