Noam Chomsky Quotes

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

Our public credit is good, but the abundance of paper has produced a spirit of gambling in the funds, which has laid up our ships at the wharves as too slow instruments of profit, and has even disarmed the hand of the tailor of his needle and thimble. They say the evil will cure itself. I wish it may; but I have rarely seen a gamester cured, even by the disasters of his vocation.

These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.

One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.

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

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst - and that brings the whole country down.

If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.

Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

To be sure, booms and busts will come and go. But their severity can vary dramatically based on the policies in place to prevent them. With stronger regulations, neither the housing and derivatives bubbles nor the eventual crash would have been so bad.

Unregulated derivatives like credit default swaps threaten our regulated markets, or indeed our economy without any Federal agency knowing about it.

Little by little, The Depression era regulations that had served America so well were rolled back and finance became the dominant force that it is today. The shifts were bi-partisan and, to be fair, seemed like good idea at the time. But they also came with unintended consequences.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

A United States collapse would be much different than a Greece collapse. Greece can collapse, and there's a ripple. We collapse, and the world feels it.

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

At some point, there will be some other financial crisis. It's in the nature of a capitalist system.

In the '90s, everyone thought we'd solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.

If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash.

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 only thing that looks good is the stock market, but if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that's going to come crashing down.

We are taking a greater chance of having another crash at a time when the world is less capable of bearing the cost.

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.

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.

We've suffered a 'Ponzification' of the economy in recent years, as bubbles have built up and then burst, and each time we act as though it's the first time.

Wall Street has become a veritable casino.