Mark Zandi Quotes

Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.

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.

We have fluctuations all the time, business cycles, and they come about in various ways, but normally what sets them off is some reduction in the willingness of our population, our businesses, and foreigners to buy.

People stop buying things, and that is how you turn a slowdown into a recession.

With the shrinking of the US economy, and it's shrinking very rapidly, you not only have more money, but you also have fewer goods. That's a classic double-whammy on inflation.

The impact of the downturn is starting to feel very real. House prices and the housing market have been taking the knock for some time and that's affecting people.

Should that worse scenario materialize, then most probably our propensity to increase interest rates will be weaker.

I think it would take a real stretch to think that I caused the problems with the economy.

The Australian economy is resilient, but business and consumer confidence is fragile.

The reality for us in America is that we will never get out of debt with more than 15 million people out of work.

The world is still in deleveraging.

We are going through tough economic times but things are looking up, and the indicators are improving not only for large corporations but also for small business.

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.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

Britain was set to repeat the boom-bust cycle that led to 15 per cent. interest rates for one whole year in the early 1990s.

Fiscal crises often turn into financial crises, dealing a blow to the real economy.

The lack of available credit and loans is having a severe impact on small businesses in particular, but also their suppliers and the bigger companies too.

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower.

This crisis is not simply a more severe version of the usual business cycle recession, the typical downturn in which economies ultimately adjust and stabilize.

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.

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 stock market crash in October 1929 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.

Total borrowing has imploded. Private borrowing has collapsed. And, in effect, the Treasury Department is the last borrower left standing.

I don't think I've been too optimistic. The government believes the contraction will be around 1.5 per cent, as the central bank said. However, we're waiting to see the Commission estimate.