Gore Vidal Quotes

That is what has happened to the United States in the international economic scene. We have deteriorated into a debtor status so that we are now dependent upon the kindness of strangers. That is not where the world's leading power should find itself.

For a generation accustomed to thinking of the United States as the world's leading industrial power, something was lost when the U.S, became the world's largest debtor.

Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.

Who owns the assets of our Nation? Increasingly, foreign interests own our assets, and we owe them money. No wonder people think our country is headed in the wrong direction. It is.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

If we hit the debt ceiling, that's... essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.

We borrow 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend. We borrow most of it from countries like China. They have become major creditors of the United States and have more power over our economy than we want them to. So dealing with this is not only the right thing economically, it's certainly right from a moral viewpoint.

The United States appears to be a debtor nation in perpetuity.

We are a debtor nation, and we owe now $19 trillion and it's going to go up very fast by the way from this point.

The United States cannot continue to lose vast amounts of business, vast amounts of companies, and millions and millions of people losing their jobs.

To give you an idea how bad the American economy is, Mexico is now calling for a fence along the border. Stay on your side!

Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States

The war is going to end because we're gonna have such a political and financial havoc here with the devaluation of our dollar, because we just can't keep affording it. This is usually how empires end, by spending too much money maintaining their empire. We're in 130 countries, we have 700 bases around the world, and it's going to come to an end. I want it to come to an end more gracefully and peacefully, follow the constitution, and follow a more sensible foreign policy.

Like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, a collapsing U.S. economy would inflict enormous, unacceptable damage on the rest of the world.

Does it make any sense to borrow money from China to give it to the unemployed I America? This weakens us.

Ireland, once an impoverished backwater from which generations fled, conjured an economic miracle…. After 2007, the party ended in a morass of insolvent banks, bad mortgages, and unpaid public debt, ultimately sending the proudly independent country begging to the International Monetary Fund.

Your friends, through economic mismanagement (see Greece), can harm you faster than your enemies. And your rivals falling (see Russia and China) can be more dangerous than your rivals rising. If Russia, an economy spanning nine time zones, goes into recession and cannot pay foreign lenders with its lower oil revenues — and all this leads to political turmoil and defaults to Western banks — that crash will be felt globally

We are only 5 percent of the world's population and 20 percent of the world's economy. We have to be able to trade in order to grow.

I get cross about 13 years of Labour government that brought the country to the state it did.

America is not better off than it was $1.8 trillion dollars ago.

We've become a debtor nation. I don't mean just on fixed-loan terms, but we own increasingly less abroad than is owned from abroad here.

The United States is a nation located in the global economy, and we get enormous, enormous benefits from dealing with foreigners.

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.

America's trade policy has an enormous impact on the economic well-being of the American people and the strategic interests of the United States.

I think it is true that, post the global financial crisis initially - and for some period after that and particularly with how the mining investment boom and commodity prices played out - there was a dislocation that occurred in some of the more traditional mechanisms.