“Rising inequality can create a more highly leveraged economy, and it can then make the economy vulnerable to a crash like 2008.”

If we don’t constrain them, and the fact that credit is primarily created to fund the purchase of urban real estate and land, which is somewhat fixed in supply.

All the empirical evidence suggests that the rich tend to consume a lower proportion of income than middle and lower-income people.

We don’t know how to get out of this malaise and I think we now have to consider more radical policies.

In economics, when you put together a highly elastic thing and a highly inelastic thing, you create extraordinary potential for turbulence, volatility, and for unstable prices.

This isn’t a stable system.

We’re not where we should be in terms of our national economies.

If your credit is going to grow at 10-15 percent per year in order to get your 5 percent GDP growth per year, eventually you’re going to have a problem.

In finance and economics, ill-designed policy is a more powerful force for harm than individual greed or error.

In absolute terms, we may have to look at restricting the number of flights people take.

The richer people, when they get another $100,000, or another million, or 10 million, don’t tend to spend it as much as the poorer people would if they got another $100 or $1,000 or $5,000.

The capitalist system is not delivering those decade-after-decade increases it promised.

Instability mostly comes from the interface between the fact that the banks (or shadow banks) can create credit, money, and purchasing power in infinite quantities

We need to move beyond the demonisation of overpaid traders

The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it

Those are my people, you know? The ones who are going to crash and burn.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.

If you ride like lightning, you’re gonna crash like thunder.

The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

We will not have any more crashes in our time.