Austan Goolsbee Quotes

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.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

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.

I'm astonished at how quickly the Great Recession came and went.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.

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

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?

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.

The United States is much further along because its financial crisis struck three years before Europe's, in 2008, causing headwinds that have pressured it ever since.

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

This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

The world is still in deleveraging.

Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

I don't think it's the end of the world even if we have a recession. We'll pull back out of it again. No big deal.

Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a world-wide depression all by myself.

We have depressions about every 10-20 years—just long enough for the current generation to forget the last depression.

I believe Europe is burning financially. Europe's problems are not going to go away. They are so structural. Yet, our problems are right behind them. We cannot just look at Europe.

With every year that passes, the more we have to be careful not to forget the causes and consequences of the Great Recession.

I think it is true that, post the global financial crisis initially - and for some period after that and particularly with how the mining investment boom and commodity prices played out - there was a dislocation that occurred in some of the more traditional mechanisms.

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