Lloyd Blankfein Quotes

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

The downturn following the collapse of Japan's so-called bubble economy of the 1980s was not as severe as the Great Depression.

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence - as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we've had since the Great Depression.

It was a lack of system that made the '30s Depression as inevitable as all others previously suffered.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics.

After the 1929 crash, the Federal Reserve mistakenly focused its policies on preserving the gold value of the dollar rather than on stabilizing the domestic economy.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

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

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

The bankers of the country are more to blame than are any other group for the present depression.

If only we can avoid a repetition of the depression that culminated in Mr. Hoover's Administration, we will be very fortunate. This depression, of course, had nothing to do with President Hoover's policies, but was the result of after-war activities by certain groups in this country which, I fear, may be duplicated again unless the people and the Congress are very wary.

The economic meltdown that would define every aspect of Obama's economy came to a head well before he became president, of course, and so did the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after.