Quote

Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

The larger the disaster, the more necessary it is to have the government as the principal driver of recovery.

Human beings have enormous resilience.

The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed have had devastating effects on the U.S. economy and millions of American lives. But the U.S. economy will emerge from its trauma stronger and widely restructured.

Successful people recognize crisis as a time for change - from lesser to greater, smaller to bigger.

Resilience isn't a single skill. It's a variety of skills and coping mechanisms. To bounce back from bumps in the road as well as failures, you should focus on emphasizing the positive.

Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.

The more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our buildings and vehicles become, the more vulnerable we are.

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.