David Rockefeller Quotes

Minnesotans lost their jobs because the credit rating agencies didn't do the only job they're supposed to have, the only job they had, which is to give accurate, objective ratings to financial products.

Alas, in 1929 came the Stock Market crash and everything changed and became worrisome. People started practicing conservatism because of financial losses, myself included.

In 2008, when the global financial crisis struck, it was a bad year for a lot of developing countries, and it manifested itself in consumer confidence.

You have to ask what is going to happen to a lot of companies when there is not a lot more money to be gotten. That changes everybody's perspective, I think.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

I think that this is the most significant financial crisis in the post-War period for the United States, and it has in fact a global reach.... I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that, as we have seen in many previous examples of different countries and different times, choking up of credit is like taking the lifeblood away from the economy.

As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees.

People aren't as impressed by homes anymore after they saw how they collapsed in price with the financial crisis.

The global economy is facing unprecedented challenges with the outbreak of Covid-19. Businesses large and small across our country are also responding to these challenges.

America cannot afford a rally to restore sanity in the middle of a recession. Did you even consider how many panic-related jobs that might cost us in the fear-industrial complex?

The attacks on Sept. 11 really sent a shock wave through our economy, and the full reverberation of that is not yet known.

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.

If only we can avoid a repetition of the depression that culminated in Mr. Hoover's Administration, we will be very fortunate. This depression, of course, had nothing to do with President Hoover's policies, but was the result of after-war activities by certain groups in this country which, I fear, may be duplicated again unless the people and the Congress are very wary.

An economic recession—even when it is of long duration—does not necessarily involve a decline in all trades.

Job loss is coming like a tsunami.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

A United States collapse would be much different than a Greece collapse. Greece can collapse, and there's a ripple. We collapse, and the world feels it.

What happened is we went into a recession beginning in December of 2007 that was the worst since 1929. And it is a very deep hole that we have been struggling to get out of.

People think rationally that the world really is more risky. Imagine in 2008 that investors thought there was a 10% chance we'd have a depression. That would partly justify the drop in prices.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren't the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

At some point, there will be some other financial crisis. It's in the nature of a capitalist system.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.