There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my work in finance, government, and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.
Henry PaulsonRead
If a financial institution has business operations in the United States, hires people in the United States, if they are clogged with illiquid assets, they have the same impact on the American people as any other institution.
Interpretation
Financial institutions operating in the U.S. affect American citizens similarly, regardless of their liquidity status.
Henry Paulson emphasizes that financial institutions' operations within the U.S., particularly those that hire American workers, directly impact the economy and the well-being of the American people. He highlights that the liquidity of these institutions is less relevant than their presence and engagement in the American economic landscape, implying that their challenges can have widespread repercussions for individuals and communities alike.
In practice
During a financial seminar discussing the recent economic downturn.
There is a time for weighing evidence and a time for acting. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my work in finance, government, and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.
In all my life, I've been trained that when there's a big problem, you run toward it.
Complexity and interconnectedness matter as much as size in assessing risk in banking.
Every global concern - economic, environmental or security-related - can be addressed more effectively when the U.S. and China work together.
I think history shows that countries have to have some kind of a threshold level of economic success before they begin to have the means and the will to focus on the environment.
I've always said to everyone that ever worked for me, if you get too dug in on a position, the facts change, and you don't change to adapt to the facts, you will never be successful.
So Europe needs to be competitive and we also need to be competitive if we wish to remain an interesting economic partner for the United States. This has to be done on the basis of strength, of competitiveness.
What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don't break the knee caps of those who can't pay back, they still are destroying people's lives.
As the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital.
I know firsthand that many employers who comply with other labor standards still hire the undocumented. Many businesses pay the minimum wage and have barely tolerable working conditions because there are sufficient undocumented workers willing to accept those terms. If we care about low-income workers in this country, we need to create pressure to improve their economic condition by reducing the supply of unauthorized workers.
It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.
Big companies are reliant on institutional investors on a punishing schedule which leads to ruthless behaviour. This form of capitalism with this structure and incentives will never deliver sustainability.
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