Henry Paulson Quotes

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

Like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

Jefferson would tumble the financial system of the country into ruin at one stroke and cause universal bankruptcy and beggary Mr. Jefferson hated the Constitution [and] pledged to subvert it. Every vessel which floated from our shores would be plundered or captured

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

… many, and arguably most economists were claiming right up to the moment of collapse, that nothing like this could ever happen.

The financial catastrophe of 2008 nearly precipitated a calamitous economic depression, jolting America and much of the West into a sudden recognition of their systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed.

We've learned our lesson with finance because they made a huge goddamn explosion that almost shut down the world. But the thing I realized is that there might never be an explosion on the scale of the financial crisis happening with big data.

A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system.

Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again.

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

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

In 2008, when the global financial crisis struck, it was a bad year for a lot of developing countries, and it manifested itself in consumer confidence.

In September 2008, the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down.

Admit it America - 2008 was our national 'oops' moment!

An attack on the scale of Sept. 11 would rock the markets and the economy.

In 2009, at the height of the global economic crisis, it was clear that we were seeing something new: the impacts of the crisis were flowing across borders at unprecedented velocity.

I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.

The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.