Cathy O'Neil Quotes

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

The billionaire founder of investment firm Elliott Management was one of several investors who warned financial ministers in 2007 that a crack in the housing market could cause huge problems for the banking industry.

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 banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession.

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe.

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.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

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

I think the average American recognizes that it took years to create the crisis that erupted in 2008 and peaked in January of 2009. And it's going to take some time to work through it.

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

If AIG collapsed, it would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc on the lives of millions of our citizens.

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.

This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers.

A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system.

We were at the stage where in a very short period of time, one of the world's biggest banks would have to shut the door and switch off the electricity.

What caused the economic collapse 2008? It was the subprime mortgage crisis.

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.

Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

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.

I don't think anybody's too big to fail. I think the - I think if what you've got is sort of a large number of institutions who are going to fail, then that ends up affecting the system.