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You know, when the cost of capital goes down, when credit becomes cheap, people start taking greater and greater risks.

The lack of available credit and loans is having a severe impact on small businesses in particular, but also their suppliers and the bigger companies too.

Oftentimes, small business owners are unable to obtain reasonably priced financing and instead turn to higher priced forms of capital, such as credit cards.

Too-easy credit and millions of bad loans made during the U.S. housing bubble paved the way for the financial calamity and Great Recession that followed. Today, by contrast, credit is too tight. Mortgage loans are particularly hard to get, creating a problem for the housing market and the broader economy.

You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.

We need banks and financiers and entrepreneurs to take risks because that's how economies grow over time.

Besides being a prime cause of poor economic growth, poor governance breeds corruption, which cripples investment, wastes resources, and diminishes confidence.

In the business world, we can point to instances when a lack of integrity has bankrupted entire companies - in sectors as different as finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

Credit markets were originally created to serve human needs; to provide businesses and individuals with capital to start or expand businesses or fulfill other financial needs.