Jean-Francois Cope 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.

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

Economic and financial crisis are getting much more usual, and they are not confined to a given country but they immediately spread all over the world, and you have to be prepared for that.

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.

Some things never change - there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial markets.

A serious dose of unemployment and a spate of bank failures can make the unelectable electable quite quickly.

It is more or less clear that one idea which should emerge from the crash, whatever happens with the attempts to save the banks from bankruptcy and people from being evicted from their homes, is that this kind of life is unsustainable. We cannot go on like this... something must be done.

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.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.

If America is a ship, it looks a lot like it's sinking - financially, morally, spiritually. It's frightening.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career.

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

There are different flavors of recession. You can get into some pretty dark scenarios pretty quickly.

I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.

Culturally, politically, everywhere you look... Read the newspaper. Go online. Our world has gone to hell.

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

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.

Not every financial company toppled during the 2008 crisis, and some seized the opportunity to take advantage of weaker competitors in the midst of the tumult.

The upward economic movement in America has undoubtedly reached its end – the crisis has come.

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.