What happened this weekend was the biggest international financial crisis in modern history. The dimensions which I've indicated by those remarks will become clearer very rapidly during the course of the day, and the following day. My concern here is to identify what the problem is in the first case, and secondly what the solution to the problem may be in the second case. What happened essentially was-we were aware of this. I was acutely aware of this during this past Saturday, and knew that this great crisis, this collapse, which is a trans-Atlantic collapse primarily, was coming on. And so we had our meetings, which were at various locations inside the United States; and we discussed these things, and we assigned Jeff Steinberg to take responsibility for reporting the facts which I had presented. And that was done.
Now what happened, of course, is after the weekend, today, on Monday, the fact that this collapse had occurred, became manifest. This is not unusual. When something is breaking down on Sunday, and the newspapers aren't functioning to deal with that problem, then they have to do it on Monday. And that's what happened. But this is the biggest crash in the trans-Atlantic community in all modern history. This is what's happened.
And therefore, what we have to define is: what is the nature of the crisis; and what is the solution for the crisis? In other words, you just can't interpret things, because we already knew it was happening. In our discussions on Friday and Saturday, it was apparent to me that this was about to happen. So we made that the subject of our telephonic discussion-and it's now there.
But it is actually the greatest financial crisis in modern history.
