Chrystia Freeland Quotes

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am not responsible for the financial crisis, I hate to tell you.

The financial catastrophe of 2008 nearly precipitated a calamitous economic depression, jolting America and much of the West into a sudden recognition of their systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed.

If AIG collapsed, it would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc on the lives of millions of our citizens.

By March '87 we're down to seven thousand, by the end of the year we're down to twelve hundred. The whole bottom just fell out of the market. It was bad for me because I was in Australia at the time.

No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.

Wall Street is in trouble because Main Street is broke.

By failing seriously to confront the most predicable economic crisis in our nation's history, the President's policies are committing us and our children to a diminished future.

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.

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

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.

Uncertainty is killing this economy.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.

During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

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

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

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.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren't the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.