Dale T. Mortensen Quotes

I think the average American recognizes that it took years to create the crisis that erupted in 2008 and peaked in January of 2009. And it's going to take some time to work through it.

Wall Street got drunk and now it's got a hangover. And the question is, how long will it sober up and not try to do those fancy financial instruments?

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.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

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.

Investing in auto companies and ensuring a financial collapse didn't lead not from a recession to a great depression may not have been the most popular thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

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.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

Only a strong economy can create higher asset values and sustainably good returns for savers.

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We'll break out of it. It takes time.

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.

In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls. As a result, gold can be very volatile - upward and downward - at the peak of a crisis.

The 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession forced widespread restructuring throughout the U.S. economy - not unlike a company gritting its teeth through a lifesaving bankruptcy.

The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.

We're still in a recession. We're not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.

Canadians know that the promise of a recession didn't happen because of anything we did here. If you look at all the causes of the recession, problems in mortgage markets, the problems in the banking sector, the problems in government finance in countries like Greece, none of those problems were in present Canada.

The main thing during a crisis is discipline, to begin investing in time again after the crisis subsides.

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

I don’t care a damn about stocks and bonds, but I don’t want to see them go down the first day I am President.

I don't think it's the end of the world even if we have a recession. We'll pull back out of it again. No big deal.

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

When the economy is bad, the economy is the only issue.