Ajay Piramal Quotes

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

Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.

So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work - what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.

Financial firms believed that if a crisis developed, the insatiable demand for exotic [financial] products would dissipate only slowly. They were mistaken.

We are optimistic with respect to thrifts .... I don't think that there is any cause for undue concern and I would reject any suggestion that we are in the midst of some sort of a major systemic problem with respect to any element of our financial services industry.

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

No matter how the financial system is set up, no matter what the economic system is, as long as you have people, you're going to have financial crises; you're going to have bubbles that manifest themselves in the financial system.

The financial crisis revealed important weaknesses in many areas of our financial system.

There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.

I spent my whole career thinking about risk, markets, infrastructure, and regulation. I had seen the financial crisis unfold, and I had seen the credit derivatives market get operationally ahead of itself, which resulted in systemic risk counterparty exposures. I began to believe that distributed ledgers had the capability to tackle that problem.

As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

There is a well-established conviction that the central banks always do what is necessary to keep the system going and then afterwards you then take care of the legal aspects. In a crisis, you simply do not have time to think about such concerns for too long.

In a recession, you must be able to call into question everything you've done before.

Investors need to get rewarded for their investment, especially in unstable countries.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

As long as I feel I am doing what I think is right and just for my country, for the Greek people, that is enough for me. Saving Greece from this crisis was the first thing on the agenda. We are now on a much more normalised road.

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

For me, one of the lessons from 9/11 is that you have to give the organization context for how you're acting, and you've got to communicate constantly, in this case particularly with all the changes that were occurring in the financial marketplace and in the economy.

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.

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

I'm not panicking, and I'm not scared, I've been through the Gulf War, the Asia crisis, and the Russian crisis.

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.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

The way you continue to be a successful business is you don't wait for the car to go off the cliff. You have to manage yourself. And make sure you do it in the right way so you are not making decisions in crisis.