Ben Bernanke Quotes

A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street. But what effect would it have on the broader U.S. economy? If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.

Wall Street is in trouble because Main Street is broke.

There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash..

Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy.

Alas, in 1929 came the Stock Market crash and everything changed and became worrisome. People started practicing conservatism because of financial losses, myself included.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.

The trouble is that the average trader on Wall Street, he or she is so young, he doesn't even remember the recession of 2001, let alone the previous one.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

Normally, the market peaks before bad news emerges. That's what happened in 1929, and that's what happened in 2000.

Whenever I see a stock market explode, six to 12 months later you are in a full blown recovery.

There will be no repetition of the break yesterday …. I have no fear of another comparable decline.

This crash is not going to have much effect on business.

I was 5 years old when the stock market crashed; I lost everything.

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

I don't know if you heard the news, but Wall Street now is a farmer's market. I don't want to say things are going downhill quickly, but Obama's new campaign slogan is 'Are you better off than you were four days ago?'

The United States have developed a new weapon that destroys people but it leaves buildings standing. It's called the stock market.

The stock market is but a mirror which provides an image of the underlying or fundamental economic situation. Cause and effect run from the economy to the stock market, never the reverse. In 1929 the economy was headed for trouble. Eventually that trouble was violently reflected in Wall Street.

The patient that's on the floor with the cardiac arrest is not Wall Street. It's the American economy.

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

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

Wall Street has become a veritable casino.

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Remember, 2000 was the year of the dot-com bust. The telecom industry lost about $2 trillion in market capital at that time.