Denis Healey Quotes

I'm the finance minister of a bankrupt country!

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

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.

The very welfare state the Occupy Wall Street protesters so eagerly applaud is what has saddled Greece with colossal debt and left its economy on the brink of collapse, igniting violent protests across the nation.

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

The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.

It's the reason why so many people left Britain like I did in the mid 60s because Britain was exactly the same then as America is today, getting ready to redistribute social wealth and it didn't work. You've seen that in places like Greece, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland where the entire country's business has collapsed, gone bankrupt. That's where America is heading.

So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 - a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe.

To paraphrase Hemingway, people go broke slowly and then all at once. We've been slowly going broke for years, but now it's happening all at once as the world's capital markets are demanding action from us, yet Obama assumes we'll just go borrow another cup of sugar from some increasingly impatient neighbor. We cannot knock on anyone's door anymore. And we don't have any time to wait for Washington to start behaving responsibly. We'll be Greece before these D.C. politicians' false promises are over. We must force government to live within its means, just as every business and household does.

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

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.

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

It's amazing that no matter how much money you have, you can make some bad decisions, and in five months you're on the street, begging.

If we bankrupt America, we will all pay the price.

The country - or the government - is headed for bankruptcy. So we're going to be continuing to speak out against corporate welfare as something that hurts everybody except those direct beneficiaries.

I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.

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.

I've been Secretary of the Treasury for 147 days, and in that 147 days I've written $133 billion worth of hot checks.

The government relying on it would be disappointed, and ruin soon stare them in the face.

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.

The Medium of Exchange, the only thing which gives life to Business, Employs the Poor, Feeds the Hungry, and Cloaths the Naked, is so Exhausted; that in a little time we shall not have wherewith to Buy our Daily Bread, much less to pay our Debts or Taxes

We have spent years robbing Peter to pay Paul until now Paul is also broke.

Jefferson would tumble the financial system of the country into ruin at one stroke and cause universal bankruptcy and beggary Mr. Jefferson hated the Constitution [and] pledged to subvert it. Every vessel which floated from our shores would be plundered or captured