Systemic Stability Quotes

It is certainly for the public good to keep all the banks competitors for our favors by a judicious distribution of them and thus to engage the individuals who belong to them in support of the reformed order of things or at least in an acquiescence under it.

There is a well-established conviction that the central banks always do what is necessary to keep the system going and then afterwards you then take care of the legal aspects. In a crisis, you simply do not have time to think about such concerns for too long.

Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.

I'm afraid sometimes certain individual cases of defaults are unavoidable. What we should do is to step up monitoring, properly handle relevant matters, and ensure there is no regional and systemic financial risk.

When large companies take on risk, then they impose risks on the rest of the system. And these are systemic risks and these systemic risks we never used to think were really that important, but as soon as we recognize how the financial sector - the risks the financial sector takes on can impact the entire global economy, we realize that those risks needed to be controlled for the social good.

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

If the government shuts down, nothing happens, and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us.

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.

Never underestimate the magnitude of the power of the forces that reinforce the status quo.

We are moving towards a world that is reordering itself and that may appear more ordered at some periods of time, but I see no sign that we are moving towards a world order in my definition of it - namely, a system which is accepted, which is internalized by the majority of the key participants.

Confidence in markets and in institutions, it's a lot like oxygen. When you have it, you don't even think about it. It's indispensable. You can go years without thinking about it. When it's gone for five minutes, it's the only thing to think about.

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

If anyone believes that the enforcement of laws will be stopped if I am done away with, that they are more than wrong, because I am not the system. The system will keep on functioning and no one will get amnesty by getting one or two state officials out of the way.

Let the entire system of government be strengthened, and let the balance of power be drawn up in such a manner that it will be permanent and incapable of decay because of its own tenuity.

The Federal Reserve is not charged with designing or evaluating proposals for housing finance reform. But we are responsible for regulating and supervising banking institutions to ensure their safety and soundness, and more broadly for the stability of the financial system.

We brought those demons under control through European structures. But if we destroy these structures, the demons will return.

Every institution has its own dignity, and if people don't respect the dignity of those institutions, it affects the whole system.