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2007-2008 financial crisis

Thursday 2nd of October 2025

2007 financial crisis Compared with whites, minorities absorbed heavier losses in the housing collapse. From 2005 to 2009, “inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared  with just 16% among white households.” From 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between whites and blacks nearly tripled, and in 2009, about a third of both black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative worth, compared with 15% of white households. Ronald P. Formisano, Plutocracy in America, quoting from a Pew Research Center study  © 2017 Kwiple.com
2007 financial crisis “Did you ever hear the word ‘derivatives’?” he said. Do you think our  guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn't have done the math.” “So having smart guys there almost caused Wall Street to collapse.” “You got it,” he said. “It took you a while, but you got it.” Calvin Trillin, conversation with a retirement-aged Ivy Leaguer from the '50s or early '60s, when only the lower third of a class went to Wall Street, unlike the geniuses from MIT and Caltech who went in the '80s or '90s © 2015 Kwiple.com
2007 financial crisis It wasn't a natural disaster. The bubble was man-made.  Elizabeth Warren © 2017 Kwiple.com
2007 financial crisis That's called business, by the way. Donald Trump, responding to the criticism that in 2006 he rooted for the impending financial crisis because it would give him an opportunity to buy real estate cheap © 2016 Kwiple.com
2007 financial crisis Why would we expect people from the classes that are most insulated from economic downturns to feel a sense of urgency about an economic crisis that hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest? Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
2007 financial crisis You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. Warren Buffett © 2018 Kwiple.com
2008 financial crisis The bailouts, the stimulus, the health-care debate: with each of these issues, the path of expertise led the Obama administration toward compromise with the power of wealth. And by the thinking of Washington, that is entirely as it should have been. Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire  © 2019 Kwiple.com
2008 financial crisis I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system. George W. Bush © 2019 Kwiple.com
2008 financial crisis The financial crisis of 2008-09 and the resulting recession were a historical watershed. The pre-crisis world was one of globalisation, belief in markets and confident democracies. Today's is a mirror image. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, October 9, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
2008 financial crisis Perhaps the most devastating political legacy of the 2008 financial crisis was the sense among a large swath of the American population that the system was rigged. Homeowners and taxpayers took the fall and “nobody went to jail”, as financial reform activists still frequently point out. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, February 13, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
2008 financial crisis Trump's rise, like Warren's and Sander's, wouldn't have happened without the 2008 financial crisis. They were all part of the political backlash that followed the crisis-like aftershocks from an earthquake. One thing Trump's victory made clear was that the Obama's administration's response was more costly than initially assumed. The decision to forgo what Tim Geithner called “Old Testament justice" and concentrate the government's firepower on recapitalizing disgraced banks might have kept the economy afloat, but it also bred a deep resentment. Trump won because he consciously evoked the disgust people had come to feel toward Wall Street and Washington and made himself into an instrument to strike back. Joshua Green, in Rebels © 2024 Kwiple.com
 
2008 financial crisis We are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces. Alan Greenspan, 2007 © 2018 Kwiple.com
2016 Presidential election I think of this as echoing of the 2008 financial crisis. The marketplace for politicians just did something as weird as the marketplace for securities did, and it did it in part because of what the market did. Without the financial crisis, we don't get Trump as president. There are other necessary conditions. But it's definitely a necessary condition. Michael Lewis, Financial Times, December 10-11, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Beliefs The greatest public calamities do not stem from any one belief system, but from fervent belief itself. The Iraq war remains a haunting case in point but the crash of 2008 also fits the pattern. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 14, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Corporate governance As Mr [Charles] Dumas argues in his book [Populism and Economics] this Victorian invention [limited liability] ensures that a company and its owners have only limited exposure to damaging consequences of their actions. Yet the implicit contract behind limited liability – companies pay tax in exchange for limited exposure – has broken down because globalisation has turned corporate taxes into an increasingly voluntary levy. Limited liability also contributed to excessive risk-taking in banking before the 2007-8 crisis. John Plender, Financial Times, July 26, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say Here in America, we have been complicit in terminating the lives of in excess of 50 million precious unborn childen, and don't you think almighty God is going to hold us accountable for that? … It's coming ladies and gentle- men. We just have a little taste of it in terms of the financial system, but it's going to get shaken to its core in the next few months, years or however long it takes, and it will hurt every one of us. Pat Robertson blaming financial collapses on abortion © 2015 Kwiple.com
Economic growth A pin lies in wait for every bubble. Warren Buffett © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The CEOs of the fifty firms that laid off the most workers during the depths of the Great Recession took home nearly $12 million (on average) in 2009, 42 percent more than the CEO pay average at S&P 500 firms as a whole. Ronald P. Formisano, Plutocracy in America © 2017 Kwiple.com
Lying The safest way to turn indifference to truth and decency into money and power is to be a part of a whole class of people like yourself, not a single big shot. A whole class of financial executives walked away clean from the 2008 crisis because so many other people were acting out the same greed-driven fantasy. Giuliani’s downfall was not in pushing Trump’s nonsense so much as in pushing himself to the front, where all the cameras were.  Robert Armstrong, Financial Times, December 22, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Cultural change and the economic decline of the working classes increased disaffection. But the financial crisis opened the door to a populist surge. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, June 28, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Regulations The risk of doing too much is outweighed by the risk of doing too little. Americans have learned that it is not okay to love your country and to hate your government. Lawrence Summers, following the 2008 financial collapse © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Preventing adoption of the “fiduciary rule” that requires financial advisers to put their clients' interests before their own is change we believe in © 2017 Kwiple.com
  
Snapshot Valium for breakfast, marijuna for lunch, and quaaludes for dinner. Jordan Belfort, the real Wolf of Wall Street, portrayed by an unnamed associate quoted by The Guardian, September 30, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com