Maurice Allais Quotes

The actions taken by central banks and other authorities to stabilize a panic in the short run can work against stability in the long run if investors and firms infer from those actions that they will never bear the full consequences of excessive risk-taking.

History proves... that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.

I don't want to drive the markets crazy. I don't want to create trouble, but rather order and rules and norms. We have to struggle against financial excesses, those who speculate with sovereign debt, those who develop financial products which have done so much harm.

Until we apply terror to speculators --- shooting on the spot --- we won’t get anywhere.

Can we prevent an almost complete collapse of the financial structure of modern capitalism? With no financial leadership left in the world and profound intellectual error as to causes and cures prevailing in the responsible seats of power, one begins to wonder and to doubt.... The financial and political authorities of the world have lacked the courage or the conviction at each stage of the decline to apply the available remedies in sufficiently drastic doses; and by now they have allowed the collapse to reach a point where the whole system may have lost its resiliency and its capacity for a rebound.

To be sure, booms and busts will come and go. But their severity can vary dramatically based on the policies in place to prevent them. With stronger regulations, neither the housing and derivatives bubbles nor the eventual crash would have been so bad.

Helping Wall Street regain confidence and stability was the last thing an angry public wanted in 2009 after the markets crashed. But without such support, markets can buckle and liquidity can disappear - often for decades, as has been the case in Japan.

I think Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shared the view that they shouldn't be in the business of bailouts, but you know, you're not in the business of bailouts until you frankly think you need to be.

It's better to have the taxpayer pay for the losses than have the United States of America become an economic wasteland. If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

We have the idea of saying that put limitations on bailouts, so that the bailouts don't occur in the future, so that we don't have to do the - look to see AIG situations or Bear Stearns situations or the Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which is probably going to be more money spent on those two institutions than the Congress spent on the TARP program.

Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics.

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

Governments need to be authorized to provide 'open bank assistance.' The convolutions of Dodd-Frank aimed at 'avoiding' this tactic are ludicrous and will prove to be extremely costly to the system.

A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role.

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

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

What Obama is saying is simple: The United States has become Too Big To Fail.

Central banks need to be able to buy bonds if there are short-term malfunctions of the markets. But buying bonds without differentiation and without limits would be very problematic.

Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.

Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.

There are still deep-seated structural problems that threaten the economic balance in the world: Between the United States and China, for example, but also within Europe. We have taken a few steps toward taming the financial markets, but we haven't come nearly far enough to rule out a repetition of the crisis.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.