Paul Volcker said some pretty alarming words recently. Volcker: Crisis May be Even Worse than Depression
“I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world,” Volcker told a luncheon of economists and investors at Columbia University.
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He stressed the importance of preventing financial institutions large enough to pose a threat to the entire system from engaging in risky behavior such as running hedge funds or trading for its own accounts.
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He stressed the importance of preventing financial institutions large enough to pose a threat to the entire system from engaging in risky behavior such as running hedge funds or trading for its own accounts.
He is certainly right on the second point. I must say the decline is bad. And the recent new on jobs and GDP have been bad. It doesn’t strike me as approaching the depression type problems but he didn’t say the economy was approaching a depression, just that the decline was steeper now, perhaps. When he says something like that it makes me at least want to pay a bit more attention to the economy.
Related: Too Big to Fail, is Too Big – Treasury Now (1987) Favors Creation of Huge Banks – Monopolies and Oligopolies do not a Free Market Make