Tom Coburn Quotes

Once in a blue moon, an entire industry is a good short.

I've lived through periods of illiquidity before. Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage.

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

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.

Commercial distress in any great business center will the more surely create widespread disaster.

When governments are selling, you should be buying. And when governments are defaulting, we should look at that as an opportunity.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

I'd be kidding if I said that I predicted the financial collapse.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

The risk from terrorism remains acute and the private market cannot continue to operate without a government backstop.

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

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

It’s hard to be a fan of the free market these days when the free market has just driven the economy over the cliff.

Financial firms believed that if a crisis developed, the insatiable demand for exotic [financial] products would dissipate only slowly. They were mistaken.

When you’re highly leveraged, everything is exaggerated. Good times are better—but bad times are much worse.

Nasty financial crises tend to be even worse political ones.

Overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world to its knees..

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.

There are going to be counties across this country that won't have any insurance company providing coverage.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.

From nuclear waste to Northern Rock and Metronet, risk is never transferred to the private sector - the state will always be forced to step in where there is a clear public interest.

It's almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

Where you really get in trouble is if the market is dropping and the economy's slowing down and you don't take action.