Henry Paulson Quotes

An attack on the scale of Sept. 11 would rock the markets and the economy.

So from the housing standpoint, steady as you go, I think, would be the best medicine.

We do not want financial convulsions.

Nothing would assure a recession more than a significant drop in housing prices.

We just went through the biggest housing bubble in history and now housing prices are starting to go up again. I don’t know what to make of that.

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

At the center of every recession is a serious imbalance in the economy and mirrored in the financial system. Think subprime mortgage and the Great Recession, or the technology bubble and the early 2000s recession. There are no such imbalances today.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

I'm telling you that there is no silver bullet to keep home prices from going down or to prevent all foreclosures.

The stress on the financial system in the fall of 2007 was significant, but not so significant as to threaten the overall stability of the U.S. economy, although it did lead to the beginning of a recession at the end of 2007.

In 2007, in the early 2007, everybody saw the housing market was falling, and at any given moment a lot of people thought it was going to fall more, and a lot of people thought it was going to rebound. You just didn't know.

Investing in auto companies and ensuring a financial collapse didn't lead not from a recession to a great depression may not have been the most popular thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe.

Inflation is not always the main problem, or indeed a problem at all. Sometimes, though rarely, deflation is a more serious threat, and we need to shelve many of the orthodoxies we have held so dear.

It was always tough, but today we are in the throes of something we have never seen in our history. It's clear in recent times the market is looking for a bottom.

For those of us in the financial world, Black Friday has a strong negative connotation, referring to a stock market catastrophe.

I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

If the banks become unreliable lenders, apartment prices will drop dramatically.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

Not every financial company toppled during the 2008 crisis, and some seized the opportunity to take advantage of weaker competitors in the midst of the tumult.

The housing market will get worse before it gets better.

CNBC was completely in the dumper when I went there.

What began as a subprime lending problem has spread to other, less risky mortgages and contributed to excess home inventories that have pushed down home prices for responsible homeowners.