Financial Meltdown Quotes

The presently existing global financial and monetary system will disintegrate during the near term. The collapse might occur this spring, or summer, or next autumn; it could come next year; it will almost certainly occur during President William Clinton's first term in office; it will occur soon. That collapse into disintegration is inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but the politically improbable decision by leading governments to put the relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy reorganization.

Everyone caved, adopted loose [accounting] standards, and created exotic derivatives linked to theoretical models. As a result, all kinds of earnings, blessed by accountants, are not really being earned. When you reach for the money, it melts away. It was never there. It [accounting for derivatives] is just disgusting. It is a sewer, and if I'm right, there will be hell to pay in due course. All of you will have to prepare to deal with a blow-up of derivative books.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you're dealt?

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, in hosting the G20 summit and in the budget, must display the same boldness in tackling the instability at home that they do in promoting a worldwide answer to the global meltdown.

If AIG collapsed, it would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc on the lives of millions of our citizens.

What caused the economic collapse 2008? It was the subprime mortgage crisis.

Who passed Wall Street deregulation that enabled the meltdown of Wall Street and the disappearance of nine million jobs, the theft of 5 million homes?

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.

We're not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we're going to see a whopper.

Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt.

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.

We have been dealt a very weak hand by the financial market meltdown, bailouts, and recession. We can't act like it's a strong one.

I've just seen it all - I've seen the bird flu, I've seen the Asian economic meltdown, SARS, 9/11, economic cycles.

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.

We've learned our lesson with finance because they made a huge goddamn explosion that almost shut down the world. But the thing I realized is that there might never be an explosion on the scale of the financial crisis happening with big data.

A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade...there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.

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.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown we should simply ban complex financial instruments, unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. This is what we do all the time with other products-drugs, cars, electrical products and many others.

Let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help them back to bed again.

I think the average American recognizes that it took years to create the crisis that erupted in 2008 and peaked in January of 2009. And it's going to take some time to work through it.

There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.