Martin Walker Quotes

In September 2008, the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down.

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

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

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.

The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected.

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.

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.

Overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world to its knees..

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

The path we're on has taken the USA to the brink of bankruptcy.

The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

We're not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we're going to see a whopper.

The TARP program was nevertheless necessary to keep banks from collapsing in a cascade of failures.

We were at the stage where in a very short period of time, one of the world's biggest banks would have to shut the door and switch off the electricity.

While we're talking about votes, Bernie Sanders is one who voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives in 2000, which contributed to the over-leveraging of Lehman Brothers, which was one of the culprits that brought down the economy.

The right hon. Gentleman will be known for ever as the only Chancellor in the post-war period who brought this country to the brink of bankruptcy.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

If the Chinese bubble bursts one day, which inevitably will happen - maybe not tomorrow, maybe in three months, maybe in three years - when it happens, it will have devastating consequences for the global economy.

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

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