George W. Bush Quotes

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.

The trouble is that the average trader on Wall Street, he or she is so young, he doesn't even remember the recession of 2001, let alone the previous one.

It seemed glamorous when I used to go into work and get to be on a trading floor or see how the business worked a little bit before I ever understood what it was.

These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.

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.

In response to the drop in wealth suffered as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis, homeowners and firms did attempt to increase savings in financial assets by reducing expenditure on durables.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

... trade in derivatives poses a mega-catastrophic risk ... derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system.

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

Helping Wall Street regain confidence and stability was the last thing an angry public wanted in 2009 after the markets crashed. But without such support, markets can buckle and liquidity can disappear - often for decades, as has been the case in Japan.

After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.

The financial crisis revealed important weaknesses in many areas of our financial system.

The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.

In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.

The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.

Well, as you know, we're working through a difficult period in our financial markets right now, as we work off some of the past excesses. But the American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system.

I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.