Meredith Whitney Quotes

If a division becomes insolvent, the credit markets' reaction to that is immediate - regardless of what period of time you think you have to remedy.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

So you know, everyone points out Greece's default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.

Credit card issuers and HELOC lenders are like fair-weather friends: They cozy up to you in good times, but when the economy heads south, they abandon you faster than Usain Bolt runs the 100 meters.

It is very difficult to predict when a bond crisis could happen.

The interesting thing about the China story, getting back to the macro and micro, and as dire as I think the macro story is - due to bad credit and credit extension that makes Greece and Spain and the U.S. look like child's play - when you get to the micro of individual companies, they look even worse.

The once-unthinkable loss of the AAA rating will constitute a further hit to already fragile business and consumer confidence.

If investors avoid the Treasury market, we could be unable to pay off maturing securities, which would mean an immediate default. Market participants generally agree that even a brief default would create potentially catastrophic risks to the financial system, like the meltdown of 2008.

All the risky things that were happening back in ’06 and ‘07 are back again to the same level, if not more. So we are in the beginning of a credit bubble, but just the beginning.

Bond investors are the vampires of the investment world. They love decay, recession - anything that leads to low inflation and the protection of the real value of their loans.

The economic position is only flourishing on the surface. Germany is in fact dancing on a volcano. If the short-term credits are called in, a large section of our economy would collapse.

I don't see (subprime mortgage market troubles) imposing a serious problem. I think it's going to be largely contained.

The bankers just got a good cussing by everybody for loaning too much money. Well, they got some awful nice buildings. So when a banker fails, he fails in splendor.

My daughter asked me when she came home from school, "What's the financial crisis?" and I said, it's something that happens every five to seven years.

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

I got plenty of guesses wrong on things in the past as well. I don't want to pretend I have some great insight... But when the global financial crisis came along in 2008 it was scary times if you were in the middle of building $5 billion buildings. It wasn't perfect... I think that I am the luckiest person in Australia.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

I did not think I would see the day when, you know, an AIG would not be able to have its checks clear.

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

The roots of the crisis in East Asia were in private sector decisions. The biggest problems were the misallocation of investment, most notably to speculative real estate, and risky financing, especially borrowing short-term debt on international markets.

After World War II the Republicans - the Wall Street crowd - were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in '46 that we'd fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

As I discovered, there is a great deal of similarity between a boom-bust process in the financial markets and the rise and fall of the Soviet system.

Greece bankruptcy will trigger a market crash. My advice: Buy Bitcoin & Gold Both will rise when the markets crash.

But we can't alibi all our ills by just knocking the old banker. First he loaned the money, then the people all at once wanted it back, and he didn't have it. Now he's got it again, and is afraid to loan it, so the poor devil don't know what to do.