David Malpass Quotes

That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehmans was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.

This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers.

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession.

I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.

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

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

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.

The 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession forced widespread restructuring throughout the U.S. economy - not unlike a company gritting its teeth through a lifesaving bankruptcy.

Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled, and thousands of homes were foreclosed on.

A Fed loan to Lehman Brothers would not have prevented a bankruptcy.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

The Commission concludes that, as massive losses spread throughout the financial system …, many institutions failed, or would have failed but for government bailouts. As panic gripped the market, credit markets seized up, trading ground to a halt, and the stock market plunged. Lack of transparency contributed greatly to the crisis: the exposures of financial institutions to risky mortgage assets and other potential losses were unknown to market participants, and indeed many firms did not know their own exposures.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

The Panic of 1893 was a dismal time of radiating destruction …. It was good for the bears …. the wild joy of men who shorted stocks and rejoiced in the ruin…

After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.

The billionaire founder of investment firm Elliott Management was one of several investors who warned financial ministers in 2007 that a crack in the housing market could cause huge problems for the banking industry.

There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

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

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.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street.

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