Simon Johnson
speaker
37 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard Dec 2010
Simon Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
For Wall Street, it's probably been the most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s.
The difference between Ireland and the UK in a nutshell is that the Irish banks became...
somewhat bigger, somewhat more out of control.
And when they blew up, the government handled it somewhat worse.
But those somewots are pretty small differences, actually, when you look at it from a distance.
So I think the UK could well be next.
And the UK still has the same structure.
Actually, your structure has become more concentrated.
And the big banks have more power to take on these irresponsible, crazy, mismanaged risks.
The banks, they got out of control.
They believed that they had figured out new ways to make money that weren't risky.
And they persuaded the regulators on both sides of the Atlantic that they should be trusted to take what turned out to be huge and totally inappropriate risks.
And those, of course, blew up in their faces and caused massive social damage.
I am not too stressed about the unproductive nature of many of these activities.
I am much more worried about
about the socially risky angle that emerges from all of the dangerous products that they produce and all of the ways in which they structure themselves and all the debt that they take on, this very high degree of indebtedness, very high degree of leverage in the financial sector around the megabanks that are cross-border.
And there's no way to deal with the failure of a cross-border bank.
So this is not about whether or not they're a little bit unproductive.
This is about, can they bring down the world's financial system?
And the answer is clear to all of us.
Showing 1–20 of 37 · page 1 of 2
Next →