I have always tried to live by the philosophy that when there is a big problem that needs fixing, you should run towards it, rather than away from it.

I'm telling you that there is no silver bullet to keep home prices from going down or to prevent all foreclosures.

The most pressing and significant problems in the global economy are unsustainable structural issues with regard to the E.U. - fiscal deficits and the structure of the E.U. itself.

Many of the Western democracies - including the U.S. - have a problem that voters want benefits they don't want to pay for.

As long as I can remember, I had a strong interest in fishing, and my parents, even though they had never fished or camped, took us on canoe camping trips in the wilderness of Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, where I could fish to my heart's content.

From the time the kids were in upper grade school and middle school, we took trips over the Christmas break to nature-focused places, such as the Okefenokee Swamp and Cumberland Island in Georgia; Costa Rica; Maho Bay campground in St. John, Virgin Islands; the llanos of Venezuela; the southern coast and highlands of Belize.

I grew up with a strong set of values - and one was never judging someone by how much money they had.

I never cared about money. When I was at school, I never wanted a car. I was focused on sports, studies, camping, being outdoors.

I prefer to work at the policy level, on trying to fix flawed government policies.

We have institutions that have been allowed to become too big to fail because we had all kinds of flaws in our financial infrastructure, in the whole way over-the-counter derivatives work.

We don't have the necessary laws or powers to deal with failing non-bank institutions. If they're a big bank, the depositor has deposit insurance, and the regulators can wind them down without throwing them into bankruptcy.

Every American business, from the biggest companies to small hardware companies, need money to flow through the system not only to create new jobs but to sustain existing jobs.

I hope to help the Indian government advance their economic reform agenda, which will benefit India's citizens and the world.

Prime Minister Singh is to be commended for beginning the process of transforming India into a global economic power by initiating economic liberalization in the early 1990s.

I was secretary of the Treasury in 2008. In that role, I had the privilege to work with many talented men and women in government and the private sector who labored to pull our nation back from the brink of disaster.

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

Taxpayer money should not have to be spent to save a misguided and mismanaged enterprise.

Large financial institutions in this country will always play a role that is essential to our economic growth. But they must only be permitted to grow and interconnect, throughout our economy, under careful oversight and with a mechanism for allowing those connections to be broken safely.

I will never apologize for changing the approach or strategy when the facts change.

My focus is on the financial sector, on getting credit going, getting lending flowing. I can't imagine anything that would have a bigger stimulative impact.

The Treasury Department has a critical role to play in helping to set the direction of a U.S. and global economy, a role that reaches back to America's founding.

America is the land of opportunity. We need to be vigilant in ensuring that each and every American has the opportunity to acquire the skills to compete and to see those skills rewarded in the marketplace.

As we work to promote greater economic opportunity for the American people, we must always remember that the American economy is deeply integrated with the global economy. That brings challenges but even greater opportunities.

When the financial system works as it should, money and capital flow to and from households and businesses to pay for home loans, school loans, and investments to create jobs.

To restore confidence in our markets and our financial institutions so they can fuel continued growth and prosperity, we must address the underlying problem. The federal government must implement a program to remove these illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy.

The financial security of all Americans - their retirement savings, their home values, their ability to borrow for college, and opportunities for more and higher-paying jobs - depends on our ability to restore our financial institutions to sound footing.

We must limit the perception that some institutions are either too big or too interconnected to fail.

The Fed has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risks across our entire financial system.

The income disparity is a huge issue. And I think that the only solution to this - there is no easy solution - are fundamental changes. That the world is changing quicker than our policies are changing. And we need the kinds of policies that will let us have a competitive economy going forward.

We need a new tax system. We need entitlement reform. We need immigration reform. These are not easy things. But it is going to take our political system working better.

The country is polarized. And I think part of it - it is not just social media. We get our facts from different places. People self-select with so many different cable channels and so many sources. I think that is a huge problem.

In all my life, I've been trained that when there's a big problem, you run toward it.

When companies fail, shareholders bear the losses. It's just the way our system is supposed to work.

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.

I don't take lightly ever putting the taxpayer on the line to support an institution.

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.

I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it's fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes, and problem-solving.

When I worry about risks, I worry about the biggest ones, particularly those that are difficult to predict - the ones I call small but deep holes. While odds are you will avoid them, if you do fall in one, it's a long way down and nearly impossible to claw your way out.

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.

There is big resistance from vested interests in China that don't want to open up to competition.

Xi Jinping is a very strong and ambitious leader who is looking to make a lot of changes in China. He is not looking to follow a Western model based on universal suffrage. That is for sure.

I do not believe the United States and the Americans are going to let Donald Trump become president... I think the challenge is Donald Trump, with his anti-China rhetoric and with his anti-trade rhetoric, is going to make the job for all of us more difficult going forward.

I look forward to the day when China has a truly market-determined solution... To get there, you need to have a currency that is market-determined, an open capital market, and you are going to need a competitive, open financial system.

I think it is asking a lot for regulators to be perfect - because they won't be.

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.

There's a great lack of financial literacy and understanding in this nation, even among college-educated people.

Moral hazard is something I don't take lightly.

I've got to say our banking system is a safe and a sound one. And since the days when we've had federal deposit insurance in place, we haven't had a depositor who's got less than $100,000 in an account lose a penny. So the American people can be very, very confident about their accounts in our banking system.

Until we stem the housing correction, until the biggest part of that is behind us and we have more stability in housing prices, we're going to continue to have turmoil in the financial markets.

I want to remind you of one thing, which is, when I look around the world and look at the long-term economic fundamentals we have in this country, I think they compare favorably with what I see in any major developed country in the world.