Douglas Coupland Quotes

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

If we bankrupt America, we will all pay the price.

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.

Defaulting on our [national] debt is defaulting on America.

For the last couple of years, as the economic ground beneath all I've accomplished and cherished has shifted so profoundly in a life-shattering reversal of fortune, I've trained myself to stay alert when the roar and the rumbling of what could be catastrophic change begins.

Tea Party attendees and health care town-hall protesters share the common belief that the extravagant spending of President Obama and the Democratic Party - absent any checks and balances - will eventually lead more people into government dependency, higher taxes, and, perhaps, our country's financial ruin.

I'm the finance minister of a bankrupt country!

The path that we are headed on economically in America is one that leads to total ruination of the American system.

If home ownership is the American dream, then foreclosure certainly is the American nightmare. It destroys more than credit. It destroys lives. And its effects are felt beyond the individual family that it devastates. It shakes our entire economy.

War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America.

Observers and even some officials raise questions about the future of Greece as part of the Eurozone, while the Eurozone itself struggles to deal with fundamental flaws at the heart of its architecture.

We saw firsthand how a collapsed bridge in Skagit County impacted our local economy, which is why we must fix our infrastructure now before it's more expensive to maintain in the future.

Part of the reason I moved from law to politics was an increasingly profound belief that how we rebuild after the 2008 crash is going to define us for a generation.

I can tell you what happens to countries that go bankrupt. I've been to Argentina. I'm familiar with the history of Mexico and Great Britain. We'll see the same things here shortly: inflation, huge tax increases, capital flight and, eventually, capital controls.

Austerity is, devastatingly, not a party political issue.

I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop, like, 200 points.

Sometimes a lengthened period of prosperity melts away in a moment; just as the heat of summer flies before a day of tempest.

When a business or an individual spends more than it makes, it goes bankrupt. When government does it, it sends you the bill. And when government does it for 40 years, the bill comes in two ways: higher taxes and inflation. Make no mistake about it, inflation is a tax and not by accident.

Insanity has infected all the central banks of the world.

There's a danger our fiscal bankruptcy might overtake our moral bankruptcy.

It is a [disputed] question, whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie [gold and silver coin], is a good or an evil I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin.

Puerto Rico is a government that is spending money that it doesn't have. What's coming in and what's going out don't match. That is, what they are receiving in taxes is not sufficient to cover the spending that they are taking on. And any entity that does that, whether a family, a business, a government, is going to go broke and bankrupt. They are asking to be given the right to declare bankruptcy, which I think should be an option, as a last resort, if there is no other resource.

You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

If the practice persists of covering government deficits with the issue of notes, then the day will come without fail, sooner or later, when the monetary systems of those nations pursuing this course will break down completely. The purchasing power of the monetary unit will decline more and more, until finally it disappears completely.

When you live in a false society, that bases its wealth upon money, then that society itself will collapse eventually. Not because I say so, because it's not based on physical reference.