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The stock market crash in October 1929 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.

The Great Recession rocked the foundation of every financial institution, including Johnson Bank. We were struggling, and it was happening under my watch.

In the immediate postwar years, the whole of Europe was in a recession. So first of all, it helped us step out of a recession; it gave a certain amount of speed to the economy. But that was the first step.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

I really did believe that the most successful investments were the ones that you could own for the long run.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

Let us not forget, the financial crisis had its roots in the decision by Congress to embark on a course of social justice to get everyone that wanted a home into one, regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.