Nouriel Roubini Quotes

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

We have institutions that have been allowed to become too big to fail because we had all kinds of flaws in our financial infrastructure, in the whole way over-the-counter derivatives work.

Businesses have no place being 'too big to fail.'

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

If you think about those bailouts that happened in 2008, that was a situation in which the government gave, at our expense, enormous sums of money to some of the richest people who have ever existed on Earth.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

The market is no god - it cannot solve every problem.

What Obama is saying is simple: The United States has become Too Big To Fail.

Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a 'moral hazard,' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

Wall Street is broken for sure because it succumbed to greed and corruption and pure speculation with no values.

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

The Commission concludes that, as massive losses spread throughout the financial system …, many institutions failed, or would have failed but for government bailouts. As panic gripped the market, credit markets seized up, trading ground to a halt, and the stock market plunged. Lack of transparency contributed greatly to the crisis: the exposures of financial institutions to risky mortgage assets and other potential losses were unknown to market participants, and indeed many firms did not know their own exposures.

Too big to fail is too big.

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

If the bankers knew so much about capital markets, how come they got into so much trouble.

The financial system is drifting back to business as usual a bit to quickly …. We are starting to see risky behavior of the sort that people were scared of after the crises

Had this attack been allowed to run its course, hundreds of billions in long term debt and equity capital that underpinned the Wall Street based speculation machines would have been wiped out, including large amounts of stock owned by executives and insiders. Such a result would have been truly constructive from a societal vantage point. It would have implanted an abiding 1930s style general lesson about the deadly dangers of leveraged speculation.

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

When things are going well, the companies stress the idea of free enterprise, with no need for government regulation. But when things aren’t going well, they suddenly become a close partner with the government and want it to bail them out. All they have to do is threaten to collapse and the government pours in more money.

Overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world to its knees..

Don't act like a bank unless you are a bank. That was a really big lesson learned from 2008.