Quotes About Financial crisis

the moral failings of individuals are irrelevant for understanding both why the financial crisis in the United States happened and why austerity is now perceived as the only possible response

When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.

The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

The deals the government and Wall Street worked out that weekend to save the likes of AIG, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were unprecedented in their reach and political consequence, transforming America into a permanent oligarchical bailout state. This was, essentially, a formal merger of Wall Street and the U.S. government.

The amount of new lending was mind-boggling: between 2003 and 2005, outstanding mortgage debt in America grew by $3.7 trillion, which was roughly equal to the entire value of all American real estate in the year 1990 ($3.8 trillion). In other words, Americans in just two years had borrowed the equivalent of two hundred years' worth of savings.

But in more than a few cases, you can draw a straight line from a cop being laid off or a union worker having his or her pension slashed back to the week of 2008 when a handful of Lehman executives took a payoff to mark down their own inventory.

this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it is because it is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. A merry go around of Ponzi Austerity which, interestingly, left both the insolvent banks and the insolvent Greek state a little more… insolvent

financial crisis, something bigger is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong.

Chances are good that if you walked away from your house after the real estate market collapsed, the Cavs now own it.

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession. Ben Bernanke January 10, 2008

Disinvestment has put economy in bad shape.

The severity of the Wall Street crash, he argued, was not due to the unrestrained license of a freebooting capitalist system, but to government insistence on keeping a boom going artificially by pumping in inflationary credit.

Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?