Roger Altman Quotes

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

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

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

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.

I am not responsible for the financial crisis, I hate to tell you.

Banks wont even loan each other money, everybody's going broke, and here we are inside here, these people are going to be out on the street selling apples and pencils and they're still going to be buying paintings for this money, so I don't know what's going on in this world.

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.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

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

It's almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis.

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.

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

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.

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

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.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.

In 2008, when the global financial crisis struck, it was a bad year for a lot of developing countries, and it manifested itself in consumer confidence.

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe.

Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected.

Not every financial company toppled during the 2008 crisis, and some seized the opportunity to take advantage of weaker competitors in the midst of the tumult.