Financial Panic Quotes

A recession is a period in which you tighten your belt. In a depression, you have no belt to tighten. In a panic you have no pants left to hold up.

The year 1983 was crazy. People wanted to sell not only their investments... but also their companies.

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

The Panic of 1819 exerted a profound effect on American economic thought. As the first great financial depression, similar to a modern expansion-depression pattern, the panic heightened interest in economic problems, and particularly those problems related to the causes and cures of depressed conditions.

As the greatest and last major crisis before 1836, the panic of 1819 holds considerable interest for the study of business cycles and for the present day. It was an economy in transition, as it were, to a state where business cycles as we know them would develop.

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

In a financial crisis, only the Fed, as the lender of last resort, might stand between our economy and financial catastrophe. We must leave the Fed with the flexibility to provide liquidity in order to stop a financial panic.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

Under the federal reserve act, panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figured, a mathematical equation.

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.

At many points during our nation's history, there have been times - known in our history textbooks as 'panics' - when adverse conditions affecting the financial and economic sectors of the country have caused individuals to hoard more than they need.

Typically in a panic, corporate bonds sell off as investors fear weaker growth, tighter financial conditions, or need liquidity.

The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.

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.

I think a lot of us feel, when we look at the Dow Jones plunging, alienated - you do feel as if we're in the grip of some alien force that slipped human control.

Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics.

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.

America already holds the record for freak movements. Now we have a new one. It's called "Restoring Confidence." Rich men who never had a mission in life outside of watching a stock ticker are working day and night "restoring confidence." Writers are working night shifts, speakers' tables are littered up, ministers are preaching statistics, all on "restoring confidence."

So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 - a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe.

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.

In the business world, allegations of accounting irregularities is tantamount to yelling fire in a crowded theater, except, today, in our Internet world, instead of people running for the exit signs, they just push the button on their computer.

Compelling large banks to hold more capital reduces their risk of failure, but as the last financial crisis [the Meltdown of 2008] demonstrated, during a wide-spread panic, investors and lenders lose all faith in the values banks have assigned to their assets, and many mistrust the banks that claim to have enough capital.

Like a bank run, a decline in stock prices creates its own momentum.

Contrary to the belief that Obama is America's Lightworker who can defy political gravity, H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, guarantees more of the same old borrow-spend-panic-repeat cycle that got us into our current mess in the first place.

In September 2008 - as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and AIG, the world's biggest insurance company, accepted a federal bailout - Senator John McCain of Arizona, in what was widely viewed as a political move, suspended his presidential campaign and called on Obama to rush back to Washington for a bipartisan meeting at the White House.