Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled, and thousands of homes were foreclosed on.

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

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.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

Fiscal crises often turn into financial crises, dealing a blow to the real economy.

I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

The Depression has caused an emergency more serious than war.

The Medium of Exchange, the only thing which gives life to Business, Employs the Poor, Feeds the Hungry, and Cloaths the Naked, is so Exhausted; that in a little time we shall not have wherewith to Buy our Daily Bread, much less to pay our Debts or Taxes

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

Hard times are with us; the country is distracted; very few things are marketable at a price above the cost of production; tens of thousands are out of employment; the jails, penitentiaries, workhouses and insane asylums are full; the gold reserve at Washington is sinking; the government is running … with a deficit in every department; a huge debt hangs like an appalling cloud over the country; … hungered and half-starved men are banding into armies marching toward Washington; the cry of distress is heard on every hand; business is paralyzed; commerce is at a standstill; riots and strikes prevail throughout the land; and Wall Street looks in vain for an excuse to account for the failure of prosperity to return since the repeal of the silver purchase act. .

Massive runs on short-term debt helped trigger the Great Recession.

Although the Fed has subjected banks’ portfolios to stress tests to measure the effect of rising interest rates and investment losses, the results might not have shown the whole picture: U.S. banks, particularly small and medium-sized ones, may not have enough capital to maintain solvency and liquidity should their risky loans and investments fail in large numbers. The same is true of the stress tests that the ECB has performed in Europe,

I come from a country in which I experienced economic collapse.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

Every day it seems more likely that we are destined - or should one say doomed? - to replay the disastrous economic history of the 1930s.

When I was born, the economy wasn't in a great state; it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.

It is hard to be enthusiastic about the economy's prospects when house prices are falling: Households spend less, small business owners can't use homes as collateral for loans and local governments are forced to cut jobs and programs as property-tax revenue disappears.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

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

It seems not to matter that we are at the brink of a war that may spread beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran and Georgia and then where? To Syria? To North Korea? To China? That we in America are in economic doldrums and are seeing small businesses fold and houses reclaimed by banks and a smouldering panic that is palpable everywhere.

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