George Soros Quotes

The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.

In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.

I think Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shared the view that they shouldn't be in the business of bailouts, but you know, you're not in the business of bailouts until you frankly think you need to be.

I felt that the Fed had always been the agency that picked up the pieces when there was a financial crisis, and it was invented to do exactly that.

You cannot have the financial system crippled because of lack of decision making and lack of quality people.

Central banks are choosing to increase their gold holdings as a percentage of total reserves. They obviously think there is a reason to do that. It doesn't make sense to back up one currency with a hoard of other paper currencies. There needs to be a real anchor there. I think that central banks are well behind the curve. If you look at the percentage of above-ground gold controlled by central banks, it's historically low. Hence the fact that central banks are trying to increase their holdings. They've got a long way to go to get where they need to be.

The President [Barack Obama], I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007?

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.

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

The Federal Reserve has a responsibility to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions and to contain systemic risks in financial markets.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

Soon after the financial crisis of 2008, I was at a meeting in Washington with a group of U.S. senators. They had invited me to provide a point of view on new regulation; regulation aimed at ensuring we never have to go through the events of 2008 ever again.

President Obama has a good sense not just of the economic requisites for financial crisis firefighting but also how you build political support for moving forward on reforming the financial system, making sure that the banks are carrying enough capital.

I take office during the most difficult moment in the country's recent history. The country can be saved - it's up to us. I think it is obvious for those who support this government to undertake the commitment and ensure that our country's euro membership is not endangered.

The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed's lending programs during the financial crisis.

Governments need to be authorized to provide 'open bank assistance.' The convolutions of Dodd-Frank aimed at 'avoiding' this tactic are ludicrous and will prove to be extremely costly to the system.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

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.

Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

No country can be complacent in making sure that excessive debt of the household doesn't create excesses and weaknesses in the financial system. Everything is interconnected.

Financial crises require governments.

Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and integrity of the financial markets.

Central bankers got it right in the United States in 1987 when they avoided deflationary pressures as well as serious trouble in the banking system.