Henry Paulson 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.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

If AIG collapsed, it would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc on the lives of millions of our citizens.

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.

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

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

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

The idea that the largest banks in the world would simultaneously fail, need government support, government guarantees, and/or government intervention to survive was not in my range of realistic scenarios.

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

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

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.

The world is still in deleveraging.

In this age, if the currency of a major nation collapses, or its access to borrowing ends, it just can't function.

Forget about banks that are too big to fail; the focus should be on cities, municipalities and countries that are too big to fail.

Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a world-wide depression all by myself.

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.

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

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

Helping Wall Street regain confidence and stability was the last thing an angry public wanted in 2009 after the markets crashed. But without such support, markets can buckle and liquidity can disappear - often for decades, as has been the case in Japan.

When a large financial institution is allowed to fail, you put in jeopardy hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans.