John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Hey, guess what? Turns out the free market? Not so free. Wall Street was hit hard Monday when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and insurance giant AIG neared a collapse of its own. Basically, if your commercials air during golf tournaments, you're done.

I was 5 years old when the stock market crashed; I lost everything.

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.

Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

Before the stock market crash of 1929 approximately half of all the stock sold in America was fraudulent. President Coolidge did not believe in the Federal Government interfering with business and would not interfere. His Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover however was worried about the extreme corruption of the system. By the time he succeeded Coolidge as President, it was too late.

It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators.

The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism.

A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street. But what effect would it have on the broader U.S. economy? If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.

If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy.

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.

The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.

You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.

Well, if you were the American public, you saw a catastrophe. In general, you would say, "The biggest institutions of America - Washington, broadly, and Wall Street, broadly - they're to blame." And, broadly, they're right.

The fear among economists across the political spectrum that was - was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second Great Depression. So, in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.

Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.

Let's stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago [in 2008]. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.