Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Paulson - Page 2

The Fed has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risks across our entire financial system.

Large financial institutions in this country will always play a role that is essential to our economic growth. But they must only be permitted to grow and interconnect, throughout our economy, under careful oversight and with a mechanism for allowing those connections to be broken safely.

I grew up with a strong set of values - and one was never judging someone by how much money they had.

When the financial system works as it should, money and capital flow to and from households and businesses to pay for home loans, school loans, and investments to create jobs.

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

As a Christian Scientist, I don't go to doctors and get diagnoses.

To restore confidence in our markets and our financial institutions so they can fuel continued growth and prosperity, we must address the underlying problem. The federal government must implement a program to remove these illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy.

From the time the kids were in upper grade school and middle school, we took trips over the Christmas break to nature-focused places, such as the Okefenokee Swamp and Cumberland Island in Georgia; Costa Rica; Maho Bay campground in St. John, Virgin Islands; the llanos of Venezuela; the southern coast and highlands of Belize.

I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it's fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes, and problem-solving.

There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my work in finance, government, and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.

The income disparity is a huge issue. And I think that the only solution to this - there is no easy solution - are fundamental changes. That the world is changing quicker than our policies are changing. And we need the kinds of policies that will let us have a competitive economy going forward.

As long as I can remember, I had a strong interest in fishing, and my parents, even though they had never fished or camped, took us on canoe camping trips in the wilderness of Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, where I could fish to my heart's content.

No bank should be too big or too complex to fail, but almost any bank is too big to liquidate quickly, particularly in the midst of a crisis.

If a financial institution has business operations in the United States, hires people in the United States, if they are clogged with illiquid assets, they have the same impact on the American people as any other institution.

When I worry about risks, I worry about the biggest ones, particularly those that are difficult to predict - the ones I call small but deep holes. While odds are you will avoid them, if you do fall in one, it's a long way down and nearly impossible to claw your way out.

Prime Minister Singh is to be commended for beginning the process of transforming India into a global economic power by initiating economic liberalization in the early 1990s.

It's hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.

I don't take lightly ever putting the taxpayer on the line to support an institution.

I see nothing easy in Washington. I see either analytically simple things that are politically complex or those that are politically complex and analytically complex. I mean, look at immigration reform, you know? It is, I think, analytically easy, but politically very, very complex and very difficult.

We have institutions that have been allowed to become too big to fail because we had all kinds of flaws in our financial infrastructure, in the whole way over-the-counter derivatives work.

The financial security of all Americans - their retirement savings, their home values, their ability to borrow for college, and opportunities for more and higher-paying jobs - depends on our ability to restore our financial institutions to sound footing.

Until we stem the housing correction, until the biggest part of that is behind us and we have more stability in housing prices, we're going to continue to have turmoil in the financial markets.

Many of the Western democracies - including the U.S. - have a problem that voters want benefits they don't want to pay for.

For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system.

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

An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention.

We must limit the perception that some institutions are either too big or too interconnected to fail.

I hope to help the Indian government advance their economic reform agenda, which will benefit India's citizens and the world.

Every American business, from the biggest companies to small hardware companies, need money to flow through the system not only to create new jobs but to sustain existing jobs.

Moral hazard is something I don't take lightly.

In pursuing economic growth, India and the United States share similar values and similar challenges. We understand that the global economy is here to stay. To keep growing and leading the world in innovation and opportunity, the United States and India must trade freely, openly, and according to the principles of the global marketplace.

I will never apologize for changing the approach or strategy when the facts change.

When companies fail, shareholders bear the losses. It's just the way our system is supposed to work.

As a steward of the U.S.economy and financial systems, the Treasury has helped lay the groundwork for the American economy to become a model of strength, flexibility, dynamism, resiliency. This is a system that generates growth, creates jobs and wealth, rewards initiative, and fosters innovation.

My focus is on the financial sector, on getting credit going, getting lending flowing. I can't imagine anything that would have a bigger stimulative impact.

The idea of being Treasury secretary in the abstract appealed to me, but my initial inclination was that it wasn't right for me to take that step.

I happen to think that global slowdown, the slowdown in investment, strengthening dollar probably provide more of a headwind than we get from the decline in oil prices.

The country is polarized. And I think part of it - it is not just social media. We get our facts from different places. People self-select with so many different cable channels and so many sources. I think that is a huge problem.

There is big resistance from vested interests in China that don't want to open up to competition.

In all my life, I've been trained that when there's a big problem, you run toward it.

I hate good press, and I abhor bad press.

I've got to say our banking system is a safe and a sound one. And since the days when we've had federal deposit insurance in place, we haven't had a depositor who's got less than $100,000 in an account lose a penny. So the American people can be very, very confident about their accounts in our banking system.

There's a great lack of financial literacy and understanding in this nation, even among college-educated people.

I have relied on prayer for health care all of my life.

Buying a home today is a complex process, but that in no way excuses home buyers from their obligation for due diligence.

I have always tried to live by the philosophy that when there is a big problem that needs fixing, you should run towards it, rather than away from it.

America is the land of opportunity. We need to be vigilant in ensuring that each and every American has the opportunity to acquire the skills to compete and to see those skills rewarded in the marketplace.

I've always said to everyone that ever worked for me, if you get too dug in on a position, the facts change, and you don't change to adapt to the facts, you will never be successful.

Xi Jinping is a very strong and ambitious leader who is looking to make a lot of changes in China. He is not looking to follow a Western model based on universal suffrage. That is for sure.

We don't have the necessary laws or powers to deal with failing non-bank institutions. If they're a big bank, the depositor has deposit insurance, and the regulators can wind them down without throwing them into bankruptcy.

I do not believe the United States and the Americans are going to let Donald Trump become president... I think the challenge is Donald Trump, with his anti-China rhetoric and with his anti-trade rhetoric, is going to make the job for all of us more difficult going forward.

Complexity and interconnectedness matter as much as size in assessing risk in banking.

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.

The Treasury Department has a critical role to play in helping to set the direction of a U.S. and global economy, a role that reaches back to America's founding.

I look forward to the day when China has a truly market-determined solution... To get there, you need to have a currency that is market-determined, an open capital market, and you are going to need a competitive, open financial system.

I didn't get the charm gene.

I never cared about money. When I was at school, I never wanted a car. I was focused on sports, studies, camping, being outdoors.

I think it is asking a lot for regulators to be perfect - because they won't be.

Taxpayer money should not have to be spent to save a misguided and mismanaged enterprise.

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.