George Packer Quotes

I think when the bottom started to drop out, we didn't recognize it.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

When a large financial institution is allowed to fail, you put in jeopardy hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

The patient that's on the floor with the cardiac arrest is not Wall Street. It's the American economy.

No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.

Commercial distress in any great business center will the more surely create widespread disaster.

I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.

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

Everyone would like the world always to be in bubble times. But that doesn't happen.

We do not want financial convulsions.

A recession is a period in which you tighten your belt. In a depression, you have no belt to tighten. In a panic you have no pants left to hold up.

… a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.

Some things never change - there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial markets.

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 Stock Market was down today. Two major businesses declared bankruptcy, consumer spending is at an all time low - in other words, Bush is back on the job.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

A recession is when a neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.

It was a lack of system that made the '30s Depression as inevitable as all others previously suffered.

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.

If America is a ship, it looks a lot like it's sinking - financially, morally, spiritually. It's frightening.

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

People clinging to job security, savings, retirement plans, and other relics will be the ones financially-ravaged from 2010-2020, the most volatile world-changing decade in history.

I don't know if we're on the edge of the precipice, but we're in a very, very, very difficult situation.

Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.