Quotes on Recession

I’ve studied the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I don’t see anywhere that we have to have a recession every four years. I don’t see why you can’t have a decent environment for years and years.

There will be bear markets about twice every 10 years and recessions about twice every 10 or 12 years but nobody has been able to predict them reliably. So the best thing to do is to buy when shares are thoroughly depressed and that means when other people are selling.

It would be silly to expect every bear market to turn into the Great Depression. It would be equally wrong to expect that a fall from overvalued, to more fairly valued, couldn't badly overshoot on the downside.

You must always be prepared for the unexpected, including sudden, sharp downward swings in markets and the economy. Whatever adverse scenario you can contemplate, reality can be far worse.

There is no Ground Hog Day, when all the economists come out from the tunnel and declare the recession is over. They have a retroactive, seasonally-adjusted Ground Hog Day.

Every time you have one of these recessions, there are always groups who say it is different this time. We won't get out of this one.

The general state of business thus does not forecast the course of stock prices except in the apparently paradoxical fashion that great prosperity affords an advantageous time for selling stocks, extreme business depression an opportunity for purchase.

"This one is different," is the doomsayer's litany, and, in fact, every recession is different, but that doesn't mean it's going to ruin us.

Every recession brings out the skeptics who doubt that we will ever come out of it, and who predict that we will soon fall into a depression, when new cars will sit unsold in the showrooms forever and houses will stand empty, and the country will go bankrupt.

The best time to get involved with cyclicals is when the economy is at its weakest, earnings are at their lowest, and public sentiment is at its bleakest.

As a rule, Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

The malady of commercial crisis is not, in essence, a matter of the purse but of the mind.

You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready. You won't do well in the markets. If you go to Minnesota in January, you should know it's gonna be cold. You don't panic when the thermometer falls below zero.

The stock market has a 100% record, in the last 50 years, of predicting upturns in the economy. It's never been wrong. It's less than 50-50 on a downturn.