Barack Obama Quotes

It's better to have the taxpayer pay for the losses than have the United States of America become an economic wasteland. If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

People say they want to be in risky environments and do all kinds of exciting stuff. But they don't actually know what risk means: that risk actually does bring failure and mistakes.

The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.

You can measure opportunity with the same yardstick that measures the risk involved. They go together.

This life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey that's great. But it's very predictable. There's so many ways you can screw it up.

If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

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.

In the future, financial firms of any type whose failure would pose a systemic risk must accept especially close regulatory scrutiny of their risk-taking.

If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.

Without exposure to potential failure, there is no risk.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

It's easy to walk away from risk, and you don't actually have to face it. Success is based upon overcoming the inherent risk you can't manage your way out of.

This great country cannot be permanently kept in a state of relapse. I believe we will reoccupy the field temporarily lost to us, and go out to the peaceful conquest of new and greater fields of trade and commerce. The recovery will come slowly, perhaps, but it will come, and when it does we will be steadier and will better know how to avoid exposure hereafter.

To be sure, booms and busts will come and go. But their severity can vary dramatically based on the policies in place to prevent them. With stronger regulations, neither the housing and derivatives bubbles nor the eventual crash would have been so bad.

Compelling large banks to hold more capital reduces their risk of failure, but as the last financial crisis [the Meltdown of 2008] demonstrated, during a wide-spread panic, investors and lenders lose all faith in the values banks have assigned to their assets, and many mistrust the banks that claim to have enough capital.

Any pick you make, or any player you sign, something can go wrong.

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.

I don't want to create a too-big-to-fail player.

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.

Taxing financial markets, promoting research and development, and mobilising investments: that means learning our lessons from the financial market crisis and changing our focus.

When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.

You can't push the envelope at 10,000 RPM and expect to come out smelling like a rose and feeling like a million bucks on the other side.