Lester Bangs Quotes

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

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.

The economic times we are facing... are arguably the worst they've been in 60 years. And I think it's going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought.

The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic.

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

The upward economic movement in America has undoubtedly reached its end – the crisis has come.

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.

There is one iron law of history. When a country’s economy starts to decline, if it continues to decline, it will lose its greatness.

Going through economic hard times is something I know firsthand.

The Great Recession rocked the foundation of every financial institution, including Johnson Bank. We were struggling, and it was happening under my watch.

America cannot afford a rally to restore sanity in the middle of a recession. Did you even consider how many panic-related jobs that might cost us in the fear-industrial complex?

So I analyzed that and decided I didn't want to be the president during a depression greater than the Great Depression, or the beginning of a depression greater than the Great Depression.

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.

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.

We start this new year in the midst of an economic crisis unlike we have seen in our lifetime.

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

The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.

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.

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?

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.

In 2008, when the global financial crisis struck, it was a bad year for a lot of developing countries, and it manifested itself in consumer confidence.

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

The United States is much further along because its financial crisis struck three years before Europe's, in 2008, causing headwinds that have pressured it ever since.

This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.