Naveen Patnaik Quotes

Political leaders in Illinois kicked the can down the road, raised taxes, and ignored fiscal realities. Now, they're realizing the consequences of their actions: credit downgrades and negative outlooks.

There is little doubt that our guarantee fund system is seriously mismanaged and compromised.

The financial failure of the United States was a government failure and not a market failure.

Chidamabaram has ruined the economy. He has turned out to be a third-rate failure as finance minister.

Expenditures have gone rampant in Puerto Rico: lack of accountability - total lack of accountability.

The country - or the government - is headed for bankruptcy. So we're going to be continuing to speak out against corporate welfare as something that hurts everybody except those direct beneficiaries.

New York State is upside down and backwards; high taxes and low performance. The New York State government was at one time a national model. Now, unfortunately, it's a national disgrace. Sometimes, the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush.

Saddam spent 35 years stealing and wasting money, and all of these systems are very fragile and brittle, and you try to fix one thing and something else gets in trouble.

If our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'

I am not in the business of pointing fingers or making excuses. However, recent history has shown that I, like thousands of others in Ireland, incorrectly relied upon the persons who guided Anglo and who wrongfully sought to portray a 'blue chip' Irish banking sector.

We are at crisis point. I think anybody that sees this nation as being on stable economic or fiscal ground is fooling themselves.

Previous governments, particularly the one before I took over, mismanaged the economy quite badly.

Well, clearly, for me in the immediate future, it is grappling, like so many other governors are grappling, with the economic woes of these states. We were all hoping to see some federal relief.

But if our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'

We're not planning for the future. If we continue to spend ourselves into oblivion, we are going to destroy this nation.

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

The rhetoric on the Hill is getting very heated and it's getting quite dangerous. The gun is at the head of the American economy and Congress is holding it and its got a hair trigger. We've got to pay our bills.

Following Greece's defeat at the hands of Turkey in 1897, Greece's fiscal house was entrusted to a Control Commission. During the 20th century, the drachma was one of the world's worst currencies. It recorded the world's sixth highest hyperinflation. In October 1944, Greece's monthly inflation rate hit 13,800%.

If you put too much aid too quickly into weak institutions, you have corruption and failure.

No government under heaven could have prevented a people from ruin ... when they were exhausting their valuable resources in paying for superfluities, and running themselves in debt to foreigners, and to each other for articles of folly and dissipation.

I've been Secretary of the Treasury for 147 days, and in that 147 days I've written $133 billion worth of hot checks.

The deficit is potentially Ronald Reagan’s Vietnam.

The government relying on it would be disappointed, and ruin soon stare them in the face.

a king-sized cancer on our economy.

The deficit had become a symbol of our inability to control and manage the cost of government.