John McDonnell Quotes

I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt - Gordon Brown's legacy to millions of Britain's families - will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.

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.

The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules.

Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.

If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.

Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family's already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy.

Houses were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them..

If you want another world war, run up unsustainable debts.

Haven't we all grown up trusting high street banks? Their branches were fixtures, not only in our towns and cities, but in the way our lives ran. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that thousands, possibly millions of us, instead of being helped have found our lives permanently damaged by the toxic U.K. financial system.

I felt great empathy for the thousands of Americans who lost their home because of a system that failed them.

Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.

The middle and working classes are paying the debt that the financial markets created.

I've known the panic of financial struggle. I didn't grow up with money at all, and my family has certainly known the panic of, 'Oh, gosh, where's the next bit of money coming from?'

I have met too many people who are looking for work, worrying about their mortgage, uncertain about their health insurance, and doubting that things will get any better anytime soon. Not just concerned about the present, many of us are doubting the future.

I had been working for eight years and all I had to show for it was this horrible debt. At one point we had the bailiff at the door.

Not having insurance not only destroys your life, it destroys your fiscal life. It breaks up marriages. You cannot functions anywhere unless you have good health.

We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad.

There is something wrong when we had more bankruptcies last year than college graduates.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

Debt has become a part of who we are… Normal is broke in America.

Remnants of the foreclosure crisis linger everywhere.

While growing up, I saw how finances can play havoc in anybody's life. While we were comfortable, money didn't come easy.

In the press, it has been said that I ran a foreclosure machine.

Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.

The financial crisis of 2008-09 was in large part the result of the so-called 'success' of people who did not understand their fiduciary duty. This kind of 'success' is extremely harmful to all of society.