Economic Downturns Quotes

Listen, I wish economic growth only went in one direction. It doesn't. There are economic downturns. They're painful, they're harmful, and they hurt families.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

Lunchroom economic conversations are inevitably graced with at least one statement from an old-timer along the lines of, 'In my day, we walked 10 miles in the snow just to get to the recession.' In fact, the nature of recessions hasn't changed much over the years.

Boom and bust is a term that applied to the Conservative years and two of the worst recessions in history.

I believe the only things that really matter in investing are the bubbles and the busts

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.

Bottoms in the investment world don't end with four-year lows; they end with 10- or 15-year lows.

I think we will have continuing danger from these markets and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis - [they] may differ in details but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap, over and over, until we learn from experience

Beyond monetary policy, fiscal policy has traditionally played an important role in dealing with severe economic downturns.

Monetary contractions are attractive as the key shocks in the 1929-1933 years, and in other severe depressions, because there do not seem to be any other candidates.

In good times, people want to advertise; in bad times, they have to.

Here's why I think the public service jobs are almost unavoidable: When we have downturns in the economy - and we will, for we haven't repealed the business cycle - unemployment will build, yet we no longer have any safety net. What are we going to do? Unless we decide to pull out all the stops and lower interest rates immediately and risk turning a recession into wild inflation, we're going to have to figure out some way of providing some more, not job security, but employment security.

History has proven time and again that downturns are the best time to invest in new start-ups. You get good deals and find a better environment for start-ups to grow.

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.

Fiscal conservatism means balancing budgets — not running deficits that the next generation can't afford. It means improving the efficiency of delivering services by finding innovative ways to do more with less. It means cutting taxes when possible and prudent to do so, raising them overall only when necessary to balance the budget, and only in combination with spending cuts. It means when you run a surplus, you save it; you don't squander it. And most importantly, being a fiscal conservative means preparing for the inevitable economic downturns — and by all indications, we've got one coming.

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street.

In the history of modern capitalism, crises are the norm, not the exception.

If you talk to people about the history of the games business during economic downturns, they'll tell you that it's a recession-proof industry.

Even the greatest companies encounter problems or otherwise fall out of favour.

Down cycles are not fun. But they form the basis for enormous future profitability

The recurrence of periods of depression and mass unemployment has discredited capitalism in the opinion of injudicious people. Yet these events are not the outcome of the operation of the free market. They are on the contrary the result of well-intentioned but ill-advised government interference with the market.

It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.