"It all began with the collapse of cod stocks."
Asgeir Jonsson, Chief Economist of Kaupthing Bank, Iceland

"Financial markets always presented a distorted picture of reality."
Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, President of the Party of European Socialists

"All the signs were there that this was going to be big, bad and nasty."
Mark Gilbert, Global Capital Market Markets Columnist, London Bureau Chief, Bloomberg News

"The American journalism tradition... firmly was marginalized during this period, at the worst possible time. This trend is real and the record shows it."
Dean Starkman, Editor, "The Audit", Columbia Journalism Review

“There were more powerful forces out there than the fear that something was going to go wrong.”
Christopher Hughes, Assistant Editor, Breaking Views

"Everyone is watching this spectator sport called the global economy. And we all want to win. We all have skin in the game."
Jason Schenker, President, Prestige Economics

"An international banking system built in small currency areas is always built on sand. We were quite naïve."
Asgeir Jonsson, Chief Economist, Kaupthing Bank, Iceland

“Unusual and strange things happen. What happened was an absurdity.”
Hugh Hendry, Chief Investment Officer, Eclectica Asset Management.

“What journalists have to say is secondary. The price of the stock market is clearly the primary interest to financial actors.”
Robert Teitelman, Editor-in-chief, The Deal

“The situation is too important to entrust to the bankers. So we need financial journalists.”
Richard Rescigno, Managing Editor, Barron’s

“Journalists have become embedded - embedded in elite structures, in the culture of Wall Street.”
Dean Starkman, Editor, "The Audit", Columbia Journalism Review

“For reasons of class and shared values, there is some sort of conspiracy between journalists and bankers.”
Daniel Schechter, Media Dissector, mediachannel.org

"Capitalism runs on numbers, but also on stories which motivate political action."
Karel Williams, Manchester University

“I thank the financial press for being so ignorant.”
Willem Middelkoop, author and Managing Director of AmsterdamGold.com

“What happened is about what financial journalists didn’t see and what financial spectators didn’t want to know. It’s the fault of everyone.”
Daniel Schechter, Media Dissector, mediachannel.org

“Old thinking was about how to save the banking system. Today’s thinking should be, can we afford to save the banking system? People know that the worst is still to come. Why doesn’t the media write about this?”
Bernard Lietaer, Research Fellow, University of Berkeley

“The system seemed resilient because it weathered the Mexican crisis and the Asian crisis. That created a false sense of security.”
Jean Pisani-Ferry, Director, Bruegel

“Media reporting in an extreme crisis faces a dilemma: the need to report on an urgent situation versus the need not to exacerbate a situation by exaggeration.”=
Melisande Middleton, Director, Centre for International Media Ethics.

“Financial journalism is in structural decline. We have no answer to the question of what to do about the decline in investigative journalism.”
Wolfgang Munchau, Associate Editor, Financial Times

“Journalists should educate themselves about the technicalities of finance. This is not about economics 101. You’re covering one of the most sophisticated parts of the universe.”
Wolfgang Munchau, Associate Editor, Financial Times

“We need to raise the standards of information in emerging countries. Coverage in those countries lags significantly behind their significance in world markets.”
Steve Schifferes, Professor of financial journalism, City University London

“What are financial journalists for? On the one hand they see themselves as an information-provider for stock traders and on other hand they have a watch-dog role. Financial journalists have difficulties reconciling these roles.”
Damian Tambini, Senior Lecturer, London School of Economics

“We need to get financial journalism out of the ghetto. If it just becomes a very specialist thing we are going to lose the debate.”
Steve Schifferes, Professor of financial journalism, City University London

“Financial journalism has become disconnected from the general public, and that’s a very dangerous disconnect.”
Dean Starkman, Editor, “The Audit”, Columbia Journalism Review

"Many journalists became embedded in the narrative of Wall Street, in the narrative of the elite."
Daniel Schechter, Mediadissector, editor of Mediachannel.org

"The idea that journalists are like radio announcers at a baseball game is not true."
Dean Starkman, Editor, “The Audit”, Columbia Journalism Review

"We need to replace the old, bad stories that worked yesterday and that allowed the political elite to replicate and reproduce the current 'business as usual'. We need to replace that with new stories that follow the money, which trace fragile long-chain systems, that focus on different fee-earning possibilities and that emphasize that there are costs connected to fees in this system."
Ewald Engelen, Amsterdam Free University

"The journalists were broadly the good guys, but what they could not do is to find a good, new story because the academics and technocrats were disabled by knowledge failure. We need to get them to act together."
Karel Williams, Manchester University

The quotes were compiled by Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck and Raymond Frenken.