Douglas Coupland Quotes

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.

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

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.

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

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

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

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.

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

Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

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

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

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

Overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world to its knees..

Your friends, through economic mismanagement (see Greece), can harm you faster than your enemies. And your rivals falling (see Russia and China) can be more dangerous than your rivals rising. If Russia, an economy spanning nine time zones, goes into recession and cannot pay foreign lenders with its lower oil revenues — and all this leads to political turmoil and defaults to Western banks — that crash will be felt globally

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 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.

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

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

Goldman Sachs was fundamentally responsible for the crash of 2008, but by that time its former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Henry 'Hank' Paulson, had been installed as US Treasury Secretary to begin the bank bail out policy, with enormous benefit to Goldman Sachs, in the closing weeks of the Bush administration. Goldman Sachs was also instrumental in the collapse of the economy in Greece that started the 'euro panic' that later engulfed Ireland.

So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 - a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe.

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.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

For me, the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the war in Kosovo in 1999 are the prelude to the integral accident.

We're not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we're going to see a whopper.

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.