Quotes About Economy

And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history?

This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.

The only thing capitalism cannot survive is stability. Stability—true stability—is an absence of progress, and a dearth of new wealth.

we're helping the consumer. Because we're taking him out of his high interest rate credit card debt and putting him into lower interest rate mortgage debt.

Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles—or major deflations—on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default.

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud…. The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000." Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature.

The problem wasn't that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold. Back

The more egregious the rating agencies' mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation.

2005 there would be $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Half a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage–backed bonds in a single year.

When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn't the actual future so much as some grotesque silicone version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned.

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system… Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. "The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found" in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

He didn't buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector.

The soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. We had this system for seventy years said Constantine. People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people qho know how to work around the system, the more people you will have qho know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who skilled at working around the system

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

Despair floods the minds of unemployed beeper manufacturers, Rolex watch salesmen, and society florists.

These Ginnie Maes suck. They get longer [in maturity] when rates go up, and shorter when rates go down, and nobody wants them

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.

Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world.

This was extreme. An NFL football field is a tightly strung economy. Everything on it comes at a price. Take

Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution.

A banking system is an act of faith: It survives only for as long as people believe it will.

One of the distinctive traits about Iceland's disaster, and Wall Street's, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risk-taking jobs.