Liz Truss Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Economic freedom is a highly desirable state -- but in bust and boom we must be prepared to face the its consequences.

I think it's been, you know, kind of like a tragic play to this point. But at this point, I think it's clear, and will be clear to the majority of the Congress. I think it's clear to the American people that there is only one countervailing force to a world where financial institutions are trying to sell instruments every day and where credit has dried up, and that's the United States Treasury.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

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.

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.

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

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

The world is still in deleveraging.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

When you take a look at the problems our country is facing, debt is No. 1. The math is downright scary and the credit markets aren't going to keep on giving us cheap rates.

After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.

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

Alan Greenspan is going to go down in history as one of the worst Federal Reserve chairmen ever.

As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

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

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

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.

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.