Lloyd Blankfein

Everybody's waiting to get paid first before they'll pay.

And then it freezes up.

And so what happens in a situation like that, which has happened periodically in history, which is why we have central banks and

one of the roles of a central bank, and not just the U.S.

central bank, which is called the Fed, is to be the lender of last resort.

If the world gets into a position where everybody becomes distrustful, and we're talking about sentiment, we're not necessarily talking about reality, we're talking about, remember the movie It's a Wonderful Life, if there's a bank run?

You think of the Depression, some of the institutions could have been solvent, but nobody could survive a loss of confidence.

If people are unwilling to take your credit

then they make you have to pay before they'll pay you.

And eventually everybody is left with an obligation they have to meet, but no money with which to do it, no liquidity with which to do it.

And that's the situation that almost everybody could have been in eventually.

And it would have been, to me, it would have been like dominoes.

It would have been over time.

And that was the crisis.

Was it certain that that would have happened?

No, but it was a much higher likelihood than anybody should reasonably want to go to bed worrying about.

You know, I think at the time, again, there's two ways of answering the question, you know, what would you have done?

What would you have done differently with after acquired information?

Yeah.

And what would you have done differently at the time with your greater wisdom and competence that the people on the site at the time didn't do?