Charles Ferguson Quotes

You shall hear a good account of me or of my death.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.

WikiLeaks combines several of my prior interests in technology, policy questions, and journalism.

A very high fraction of America’s economic problems come not from our difficulties with education or globalization or competition with the Chinese or whatever. But they come from the fact that a small number of wealthy and powerful people who run dangerous and/or inefficient companies are able, through the use of money in the political process, to prevent the government from regulating them properly.

When the financial crisis arrived, it seemed to me that this was something I had to make a movie about.

It is much simpler and easier to collect and caress the trophies of our democratic inheritance than it is to fashion up-to-date tools with which to work on our current problems.

But that’s not how most of the people mentioned in this book became wealthy. Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful.

Everyone knows, or has strongly suspected, that capital theory is difficult.

I’d been a film maniac since I was very young; by the time I was eight or nine years old, I was hooked on movies.

Any attempt to disturb the deadly routine of instruction is looked upon as sabotage. And the notion that the aims and functions of education should be determined in the local community by a close and continuous discussion among students, faculty, administration, and citizens is so visionary that it is not even seriously considered.

Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.

I’m actually all in favor of freeing the entrepreneurial spirit – but it turns out, interestingly, that you actually need very strict regulations to free the entrepreneurial spirit.