John Lanchester Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

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

I don't think anybody's too big to fail. I think the - I think if what you've got is sort of a large number of institutions who are going to fail, then that ends up affecting the system.

I don't know if we're on the edge of the precipice, but we're in a very, very, very difficult situation.

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.

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.

There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

It was always tough, but today we are in the throes of something we have never seen in our history. It's clear in recent times the market is looking for a bottom.

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany.

The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.

The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

Uncertainty is killing this economy.

In 2009, at the height of the global economic crisis, it was clear that we were seeing something new: the impacts of the crisis were flowing across borders at unprecedented velocity.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

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

In this age, if the currency of a major nation collapses, or its access to borrowing ends, it just can't function.

I think, my generation, it's hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.