Market Instability Quotes

Subsidies and bailouts cannot compensate for uncertain or permanently diminished market access.

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

There is little room for complacency, and it is important to guard against sporadic volatility in financial markets.

I did not forsee a day where the government had to intervene to bail out basically everybody.

The markets don't like instability and they don't like uncertainty.

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

We know what a health insurance death spiral looks like because we've seen them before ... Washington state's experience in the 1990s is particularly instructive: After the state put in place guaranteed issue and community rating rules, carriers saw an influx of unusually sick and expensive beneficiaries, as well as individuals gaming the system by signing up for coverage in advance of an expensive medical event, then cancelling as soon as that event was over. Insurers simply couldn't make money in the individual market, and so between 1993 and 1998, 17 of the state's 19 plans stopped selling individual insurance plans. The next year, the final two carriers left the individual market. It was a total meltdown.

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

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Economic markets are collapsing. People all over the world are suffering and people afraid. What happens when peep are afraid? They become intolerant.

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

The financial system is drifting back to business as usual a bit to quickly …. We are starting to see risky behavior of the sort that people were scared of after the crises

Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.

When you see government leaders really bullying business, you know that government's economic policy is failing. They get angry and they get desperate.

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

It seems that there has been some disturbed selling in the market

When interest rates are low we have conditions for asset bubbles to develop, and they are developing at the moment. The ultimate asset bubble is gold.

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.

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

An economy may be in equilibrium from a short-period point of view and yet contain within itself incompatibilities that are soon going to knock it out of equilibrium.

When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.

I've always been sceptical about the notion that the market is a person you can engage in an argument with, and that that person is an intelligent, rational, well-intentioned person: it is fantasy. We know that ... the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and is vindictive ... You're dealing with a crazy man ... Having got what he wants he will still kill you.

… many, and arguably most economists were claiming right up to the moment of collapse, that nothing like this could ever happen.