Nick Harkaway Quotes

Growth based on debt is unsustainable, artificial.

We spend too much, we borrow too much, and we distort the markets. The bigger the distortions have lasted, the bigger the bust will be.

The culture of self-gratification and deregulation that began during the Clinton years and continued under President George W. Bush led to the bursting of one stock market bubble at the turn of the century and a full-scale financial crash less than a decade later.

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.

There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis.

Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed -- humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.

Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.

At the center of every recession is a serious imbalance in the economy and mirrored in the financial system. Think subprime mortgage and the Great Recession, or the technology bubble and the early 2000s recession. There are no such imbalances today.

And people really behaved in a fraudulent way or something, we'll go back and find the culprits later on. But that really isn't the problem we have. I mean that's where it came from, though. We leveraged up and if you have a 20 percent fall in value of a $20 trillion asset, that's $4 trillion. And when $4 trillion lands - losses land in the wrong part of this economy, it can gum up the whole place.

What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it.

I think there were bad actors in the government and bad actors in the finance, mortgage, markets industries that need to be called out and held accountable.

And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics.

Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction.

Many of our problems are home-grown. Gordon Brown regularly advised the rest of the world to follow his British model of growth. But the model was flawed. It led to the highest level of household debt in relation to income in the world.

Everyone would like the world always to be in bubble times. But that doesn't happen.

Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

Booms are great while they last but they don’t last forever.

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

Nothing would assure a recession more than a significant drop in housing prices.

From time to time, capitalism has a tendency to implode.

The current crisis is not simply a market failure in which prices are not functioning properly, but a profound loss of faith in money’s capacity to tell the truth.

This was a massive Ponzi scheme and the biggest crime against the American economy in our lifetimes—in fact, ever…. You had various traders buying each other’s products to artificially keep the prices up so that the bubble didn’t collapse.

The Panic of 1893 was a dismal time of radiating destruction …. It was good for the bears …. the wild joy of men who shorted stocks and rejoiced in the ruin…