Henry Paulson Quotes

I guess that's one achievement I'm really proud of. Saving Chrysler was more than jobs, more than shareholder value. Saving Chrysler was a good idea for the whole country.

What I've said repeatedly is, 'I think the auto industry is a very important industry.'

The government assistance to the automobile industry was a tremendous success. The American auto industry was saved. Workers kept their jobs. The auto companies all have paid back their loans and they are all now profitable. If we had lost the auto industry, the industrial backbone of the country would have been destroyed. Steel, glass, rubber all would have collapsed.

It is the instinctive wish of most American businesspeople, even those unlikely to be directly affected, that General Motors not go bankrupt.

I admire President Obama. He inherited the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That was a terrible time for America.

I just want to say that the only thing less popular than putting money into banks is putting money into the auto industry.

Republicans in Congress have two choices here: They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills; or they can act irresponsibly, and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.

No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.

A budget matters to Americans who can't afford to see their taxes go up or lose the jobs that would be destroyed in the process.

Investing in auto companies and ensuring a financial collapse didn't lead not from a recession to a great depression may not have been the most popular thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

But if, if you take a look at what would have happened, I mean, do we need to see soup lines down the street to figure out what would have happened? We avoided - and all economists will tell you that millions of jobs were saved because of the Recovery Act, and we avoided a second Great Depression. That, that is a reality.

The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.

I think those autoworkers whose industry would have collapsed if the president hadn't intervened are certainly better off.

We believe that it is very important that we have hopefully averted what would have been the most substantial headwind of all, which is a default for the first time in our history, and that that will contribute to a more positive environment that we hope will allow for greater growth and job creation.

New York never felt the recession. New York never felt a depression.

The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.

People rightly want our political leaders - on all sides - to concentrate on minimising the damage to jobs, living standards and our savings from the banking crisis.

The upward economic movement in America has undoubtedly reached its end – the crisis has come.

Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

The too-big-to-fail reform project is massive in scope. In my view, it holds real promise. But the project will take years to complete. Success is not assured.

'Too big to fail' is fine for restaurant chains. If Denny's fails, it's fine for this economy. You can always go down to the TGIFs. But that's not the same for large-scale investment companies.

The few effective provisions of Dodd-Frank are masked by its many flaws - flaws that have been and will continue to be detrimental to the American economy and our financial future if not reversed.

The economy is most important. It is off track.

The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.