Charles Duhigg Quotes

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

I want to see an end to sovereign risk questions over Australia.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would destabilize the greatest economy in the world.

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

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

I don't think anybody's too big to fail. I think the - I think if what you've got is sort of a large number of institutions who are going to fail, then that ends up affecting the system.

The Dodd Bill does very little to reduce financial risks. What it will do is make Wall Street even more the servant of bureaucrats in Washington and the political party in power. That is not in the best interests of the American people.

If you were approaching the TARP investments from a pure investment standpoint, then there's no doubt in my mind the taxpayer lost, and probably lost big.

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.

If a bank's too big so that it can't fail without hurting our economy, well then, it's too big.

The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.

I felt terrified as the chief regulator that I would start a run on my own industry

The financial system is drifting back to business as usual a bit to quickly …. We are starting to see risky behavior of the sort that people were scared of after the crises

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.

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

Every time I get accustomed to low volatility, like we were towards the end of the Greenspan era, and we think we have all the levers under the control... something erupts to remind us that the idea that anybody is in control of everything is hubris.

We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Frank Raines.

There is no risk-free path for monetary policy.