Bill Gross Quotes

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

Preventing liquidation of an unbalanced market will leave you in tears.

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.

It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.

To be sure, booms and busts will come and go. But their severity can vary dramatically based on the policies in place to prevent them. With stronger regulations, neither the housing and derivatives bubbles nor the eventual crash would have been so bad.

It's almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

Minnesotans lost their jobs because the credit rating agencies didn't do the only job they're supposed to have, the only job they had, which is to give accurate, objective ratings to financial products.

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

The trouble is that the average trader on Wall Street, he or she is so young, he doesn't even remember the recession of 2001, let alone the previous one.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

We don't have sales trading, brokerage, capital lending - any of those kinds of things that got some of the Wall Street firms a little bit in trouble.

Everywhere you look, there's a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

I've lived through periods of illiquidity before. Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage.

When governments are selling, you should be buying. And when governments are defaulting, we should look at that as an opportunity.

If troubled companies want to explain away 2008 as a 'black swan,' then someone should take responsibility for creating the oil slick that seems to have tarred the entire flock!

The financial crisis is a stark reminder that transparency and disclosure are essential in today's marketplace.

I think the market should reward banks that have been transparent in recognising their problems. I think the tendency of banks to hide the problem assets over a period of three or four years should not be allowed.

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'

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.

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

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

The lesson of 2008 is that ultimately our markets are driven by confidence.