Henry Paulson Quotes

Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic.

I have newspapers coming to me and saying, 'Can we get in on the TARP?'.

On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

On any measure, Spain's bank rescue has been a disaster. A hundred million euros have been added to the national debt, ten-year bonds are at a record high and the country's credit rating has been downgraded three notches.

Investing in auto companies and ensuring a financial collapse didn't lead not from a recession to a great depression may not have been the most popular thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

President Obama has a good sense not just of the economic requisites for financial crisis firefighting but also how you build political support for moving forward on reforming the financial system, making sure that the banks are carrying enough capital.

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.

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

Not every financial company toppled during the 2008 crisis, and some seized the opportunity to take advantage of weaker competitors in the midst of the tumult.

Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatever form of state intervention is currently being peddled.

If by carelessness in controlling inflation and imposing controls on our general economy we are unable to meet these temporary but vital calls upon us, we will be courting real disaster.

I was secretary of the Treasury in 2008. In that role, I had the privilege to work with many talented men and women in government and the private sector who labored to pull our nation back from the brink of disaster.

The bank bailout should have been more focused on helping small and medium sized banks, on helping homeowners. I think the trade agreements are a disaster.

It's hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.

I think the bailouts in 2008 were wrong. And I think, you look in hindsight, it was a lot of misinformation that was presented about the bailouts of the banks in the West.

I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it's fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes, and problem-solving.

[Obama White House] rescued the economy from the worst recession.

The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.

One of the very difficult parts of the decision I made on the financial crisis was to use hardworking people's money to help prevent there to be a crisis.

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007?

In the past six months, our federal government has devised a dozen strategies to save America's financial markets. Each plan has been more costly, more risky, and less aligned with the principles of our country's free market economy than the last. I am disappointed to say that this latest plan puts all the rest of them to shame.

I passionately disagreed with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan to bail out the banks by using a public fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help banks take toxic assets off their balance sheets. I argued that it would be much better to put the money where the hole was and replenish the equity of the banks themselves.

We really accomplished what we set out to do with the Recovery Act programs, which was to fill the lending gap created by the crisis.