Jeremy Paxman Quotes

Why are we in this mess, now facing the prospect of economic armageddon? It's because the prevailing characteristic has been greed, and it doesn't matter whether it's individuals living beyond their means or governments living beyond their means or people seeking to get rich quick.

Many of our problems are home-grown. Gordon Brown regularly advised the rest of the world to follow his British model of growth. But the model was flawed. It led to the highest level of household debt in relation to income in the world.

Let's be honest: It wasn't just the banks who messed up. There were a lot of people who tried to buy assets they couldn't afford. That's a reality.

Netanyahu's government and its faulty and politicized priorities are leading Israel into bankruptcy.

The path we're on has taken the USA to the brink of bankruptcy.

It's the reason why so many people left Britain like I did in the mid 60s because Britain was exactly the same then as America is today, getting ready to redistribute social wealth and it didn't work. You've seen that in places like Greece, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland where the entire country's business has collapsed, gone bankrupt. That's where America is heading.

By failing seriously to confront the most predicable economic crisis in our nation's history, the President's policies are committing us and our children to a diminished future.

There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.

If the Chinese bubble bursts one day, which inevitably will happen - maybe not tomorrow, maybe in three months, maybe in three years - when it happens, it will have devastating consequences for the global economy.

I think when the bottom started to drop out, we didn't recognize it.

The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules.

We have seen that in this country in the last few years, particularly on Wall Street, with the rise of the old human frailty of greed. This occurs when people begin to serve only their own needs to the detriment of everyone else.

Investors are impatient and they are also desperate for the 'next big thing,' and they are not paying attention to the fact that the 'next big thing' can be an economic crisis that they have created by being very irresponsible with their power.

In those days, even as a boy, I watched some people that I knew were living way beyond their means.

We are at crisis point. I think anybody that sees this nation as being on stable economic or fiscal ground is fooling themselves.

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

To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.

You know those movies where the people in the audience are screaming, 'Don't go in that door!' because you know the killer is there? Well, it is the same thing with this debt. We know how this ends.

In this age, if the currency of a major nation collapses, or its access to borrowing ends, it just can't function.

Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

Wall Street is broken for sure because it succumbed to greed and corruption and pure speculation with no values.

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression - just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.

I think that the economy, and the political system, has literally become such a disaster I don't know if it's possible to save it.

No government under heaven could have prevented a people from ruin ... when they were exhausting their valuable resources in paying for superfluities, and running themselves in debt to foreigners, and to each other for articles of folly and dissipation.

A recession is a period in which you tighten your belt. In a depression, you have no belt to tighten. In a panic you have no pants left to hold up.