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“Even though he’s the Fed chairman, he’s going to get hit — but I think lot of people will in Washington”
—William Wheaton, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“We need to be careful about trying to over rely on the GSEs because the GSEs have a lot of challenges already and there’s only so much of a role that they can play [in solving the subprime mortgage crisis]”
—Sheila Bair, Chairman of U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
“The important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.”
Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.
You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!
Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!
Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?
Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?
Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.
You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.
I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.
—DMX (Dark Man X)
“The last recession officially ended after eight months, but employment didn’t start to recover until 30 months later, so I think we go at least that long this time. If the recession started in January 2008, then that would mean July 2010 is the first month we have anything that feels like a recovery. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes longer than that – maybe into 2011”
“If the Fed responds this time with as much cutting as it did in the last two recessions, we get to zero. And then the problem is, What if that isn’t enough? And there’s a pretty good chance it won’t be.”
“We’re looking at the classic pushing-on-a-string problem, where the Fed can cut, but it’s not clear it does much for the real economy.”
“When the spread gets that big, it suggests that banks are losing trust in each other.”
“We had a first wave more than a year ago, when subprime first began to go. And everyone said that was contained. We had a second wave last August, when things started going to hell. We had a third wave late in the fall, and heroic efforts seemed to bring the problems under control. And now here we go again. This is starting to look like a much more comprehensive financial crisis.”
“It seems to me like every few weeks there’s another $300 billion market I’ve never heard of that has just collapsed.”
“What we’re having looks like a minor-key version of the bank failures in the early 1930s. Now it’s mostly not banks, it’s markets that were serving the function of banks and institutions that were doing banklike stuff, and it’s not as bad – at least so far. But it’s a question. If we were actually having a string of bank failures, then we would know what to do. The government would essentially seize the banks and guarantee the deposits. But what do you do when you have a wave of failures of things like the auction-rate securities market, which was effectively a funny way of doing banking? If you look historically at other financial crises, they typically end up with big government bailouts. But how’s that going to work in this case? We don’t even know who to bail out. And part of the problem is we don’t even know who owes what to whom.”
“The Fed is throwing the dollar out of the window. Everyone listening should get out of the dollar.”
—Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, who predicted the start of the commodities rally in 1999.
“This is a serious crisis. Something is systemically very wrong and we’re at a very dangerous moment.”
—David Goldman, senior portfolio strategist at Asteri Capital in New York and former head of debt research at Banc of America Securities LLC.
“Glass-Steagall protected bankers against themselves. Bankers are sheep. They don’t mind going over the cliff if everyone else goes over the cliff.”
—Jean-Marie Eveillard, 68, who runs the $21.3 billion First Eagle Global Fund in New York
“I believe the U.S. economy is now in recession. Could this become the worst recession we have seen in the post-war period? I think the answer is yes. I would emphasize the word ‘could’.”
“By almost every measure the U.S. economy is moving sideways or slightly down for the last few months…I think this recession could be substantially more severe”
—Martin Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, at the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Florida.
“[The] risks have reached a point that the right thing is to act and act in a very serious way.”
—Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary, chairman of Citigroup
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