Financial Crisis Quotes

“Their society had been built to fail. Dynasties of power and parties of authority had on retrospect, staged countless renditions of the same play. Granted, an evolution had occurred. But the story unfolded the same way.”
― Rohith S. Katbamna, Down and Rising

“...If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money.

How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...”
― Steve Keen

“Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses.”
― Michael Robotham, The Wreckage

“Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key.

Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing?

They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […]

Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.

First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.

Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract.

Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made.

So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home.

What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit.

By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“And the banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
― Richard Joseph Durbin

“How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. "I can't really talk to them about it," he says. "They're English.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.”
― Utsa Patnaik, The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry

“Lack of financial planning is the root of all empty wallets”
― Mac Duke The Strategist

“Rumpus" was a favourite PJ-word; one he'd employed to describe a recent tabloid splash about his friendship with a lap dancer. It was also a term he'd used in reference to both 9/11 and the global recession.”
― Mick Herron, Real Tigers

“A regulator's greatest fear is the sequential collapse of hedge funds, banks, and brokerages. That process is hard to spot and even harder to stop.
...
There are two sides to every trade. In a crash there can be just as many winners as losers. The problem arises when the losers go out of business. At that point the winners can't collect so they become losers too. It's as if you were a big winner at roulette and went to the cashier to collect your winnings only to find the cashier window closed and the casino had just filed for bankruptcy. All you have left is a pocketful of worthless chips. At that point, even the market winners can fall into financial distress. Because of leverage, total losses can exceed the size of the market itself. It's like a minefield. Banks running from panic start stepping on mines.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“While there's nothing new about financial panics, the role of AI/GPT is new and makes matters exponentially worse. That's not a criticism of AI which works as intended. It's a criticism of humans who don't understand the tool, over-rely on it, and allow it far too much autonomy in the trading process.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“The increase in barrel prices strongly contributed to inflation, which then triggered an escalation in interest rates, an increase that caused the explosion of the subprime bubble.”
― Matthieu Auzanneau

“The two fathers present structurally the choice between two corporations, two modes of accumulation, two styles of financial masculinity. The Old Conservatism and the New Conservatism, the old patriarchy and the new patriarchy, the industrial monopoly capital of airlines and the monopoly financial capital of a corporate raider. Perhaps the film's most radical critique and uncertainty is that both paternal men are respectively ill. Gekko has the high blood pressure thats befits financial accumulation: It is able to be continually monitored, the sphygmomanomater is an instrument for the continuous conveying of exact information, diastolic and systolic ratios rise and fall in different social contexts. Bud's father is made sick by an old-fashioned, industrial heart attack - his illness is a consequence of the steady accumulation of arterial plaque.”
― Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

“THE LAW
The law can be a double-edged sword to those who violate it and a source of hope, comfort, and inspiration to those who seek justice and peace.”
― David Gomadza, Tomorrow's World Order

“Wall Street treats all crises the same despite the fact that people react to the threat of war very differently from other crises like disease, systemic medical incompetence, or the failure to maintain a country’s transportation infrastructure.”
― Christopher Manske, The Prepared Investor: How to Prevent the Next Crisis from Affecting Your Financial Independence

“And every dollar they saved was worth less with every financial crisis, while the government just printed more money to preserve the stock markets, the financial status of the elites, and the banks who served them.”
― Kenneth Eade, An Evil Trade

“Every dollar they saved was worth less with every financial crisis, while the government just printed more money to preserve the stock markets, the financial status of the elites, and the banks who served them.”
― Kenneth Eade, An Evil Trade

“All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). However, the feedback between the two processes grew to new heights in the Age of Capital. The rise of commodification, which also led to the flourishing of finance, coincided with a subtler, more powerful, form of consent. And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“FEAR OF FAILURE IS BORN FROM THE LACK OF REQUIRED SKILLS!”
― Aryan Chaudhary, Your Last Step To Fast Financial Freedom

“No se sabe quien nada desnudo hasta que baja la marea.”
― Warren Buffett

“Wall Street's contradictory approach to shareholder value and bull markets sets the stage for a financial crisis.”
― Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

“After the predicted disaster occurred, an “emerging consensus” developed among economists “on the need for macroprudential supervision” of financial markets, that is, “paying attention to the stability of the financial system as a whole and not just its individual parts.” Two prominent international economists added that “there is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle. Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it out. This response teaches the financial sector: take large gambles to get paid handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs—they will be paid by taxpayers” through bailouts and lost jobs, and the financial system “is thus resurrected to gamble again—and to fail again.” The system is a “doom loop,” in the words of the official of the Bank of England responsible for financial stability.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“For the world, there are many very serious crises, such as the food crisis, already mentioned, or the environmental crisis, which threatens real catastrophe for everyone. But for the West in 2008–9, the phrase “the crisis” refers unambiguously to the financial crisis that has its deeper roots in inherent market inefficiencies, neoliberal doctrines about the alleged value of financial liberalization, dogmas about “efficient markets” and “rational expectations,” deregulation, exotic financial instruments that yielded profits beyond the dreams of avarice for a few—all brought to a head by an $8 trillion housing bubble that somehow regulators and economists did not perceive, portending ultimate disaster, as a few warned all along, notably economist Dean Baker.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“After the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was criticized because he hadn’t followed through on his brief warning about “irrational exuberance” at the height of the late ’90s tech bubble. But that is the wrong criticism: it was quite rational exuberance, when the taxpayer is there to bail you out under the operative principles of state capitalism. The doctrine has been observed with precision by Obama and his advisers—selected from the leading figures who were largely responsible for creating the crisis, while excluding those, among them Nobel laureates, who had been issuing warnings about it. And the doctrine appears to have worked very well. The big financial institutions that were the immediate culprits have been making out like bandits, bigger than ever, reporting great profits and paying huge bonuses to the culprits, enjoying even a more lavish government insurance policy, and therefore encouraged to set the stage for the next and worse crisis. That is recognized, but the managers who play by the rules cannot really be criticized. These are institutional decisions. Managers either play the game, or someone else replaces them who will.”
― Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

“GPT surpasses all ... when it comes to conversation, research, and writing. ... creating an algo[rithm] that sells stocks based on a large training set of materials, correlations to past crises, and commonsense heuristics aimed at not being the last one out of a burning barn is trivial. The danger ... is not in the single system but in the resonance of millions of similar systems doing the same thing at the same time. No science fiction is needed.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“... A bank run never involves just one bank, however large. ... Bank runs are not about capital ratios and liquidity. They're about confidence and psychology.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“This ... he largest financial bailout in history ... was not just a bailout of SVB [Silicon Valley Bank]. It was a bailout of over fifty thousand SVB depositors with over $170 billion in deposits. It was a bailout of SVB's customers, it's employees, their suppliers, and the entire high-tech startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley and around the world.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“This ... the largest financial bailout in history ... was not just a bailout of SVB [Silicon Valley Bank]. It was a bailout of over fifty thousand SVB depositors with over $170 billion in deposits. It was a bailout of SVB's customers, it's employees, their suppliers, and the entire high-tech startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley and around the world.”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy