Financial Disaster Quotes

The Great Depression in the United States was caused - I won't say caused, was enormously intensified and made far worse than it would have been by bad monetary policy.

As the titanic losses were racking up, Fannie Mae's operators, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, disguised the catastrophe by orchestrating a $5 billion accounting fraud - all the while continuing to pressure banks to make absurd, politically correct loans and denouncing Republicans as enemies of the poor.

If I were the treasury secretary or head of the Fed, you know, I would try to scare the hell the out of the private sector and say, you better save this because you're going down with the ship.

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

Ireland, once an impoverished backwater from which generations fled, conjured an economic miracle…. After 2007, the party ended in a morass of insolvent banks, bad mortgages, and unpaid public debt, ultimately sending the proudly independent country begging to the International Monetary Fund.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.

Iceland is a rich country, but in the early 21st century, this prosperity got to our heads, and in 2008, it collapsed.

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

If the American government can't stand behind the dollar, the world's benchmark currency, then the global financial system will very likely enter a new era in which there is much less trade and much less economic growth. It would be, by most accounts, the largest self-imposed financial disaster in history.

We were at the stage where in a very short period of time, one of the world's biggest banks would have to shut the door and switch off the electricity.

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

Manchester United and Liverpool have been bought with huge leverage, and we've got Roman Abramovich at Chelsea who can turn his loans into shares. It is really important for the Premier League to ask itself: if a club is being bought on such a mountain of debt, isn't that a possible recipe for disaster for the future?

You know those movies where the people in the audience are screaming, 'Don't go in that door!' because you know the killer is there? Well, it is the same thing with this debt. We know how this ends.

In my opinion, the United States and many Western nations have a financial disaster coming, caused by our educational system’s failure to adequately provide a realistic financial education program for students.

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

There is no doubt One.Tel was a terrible investment and something that I regret greatly.

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

A default on our debts as a result of not meeting our obligations would be a disaster for the stock market, and Americans would see their retirement funds shrivel up.

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.

Gox is the worst-run business in the history of the world.