Sneak Preview: "No Way Back"

We're in the midst of preparing a CNBC-sponsored debate program from WEF,"No Way Back", so here's a sneak peek at what the the all-star panel had to say.

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World Economic Forum


NYSE EuronextCEO Duncan Neiderauer:

"Rather than spend the next two years, which I don't believe we have, creating new regulation, we should try and apply existing regulations which we know work."

Ernst & Young CEO Jim Turley:

"We have to make sure we don't stifle out innovation because if this gets stifled out, the economic recovery will not come."

Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick:

"The corporate world is deleveraging and its being pushed out by government leveraging. If you look at it, the banks can't borrow now so who will put the money in? It's governments around the world."

"Which politicians should run the banks? Holy moly! Capitalizing them is one thing. Running the bank?"

Laura Tyson, professor, Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley:

"The government is coming in because the private system is closed down. Governments can borrow, banks cannot. The reason they can't borrow is because nobody trusts them. Why should they trust them?"



Nouriel Roubini, the Stern School of Business, New York University:

"We have the biggest leverage problem in human history. You have houses that put zero downpayments. Their leverage is infinite. It's just a Ponzi economy."

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman:

"Nationalization? Bad idea. Not a good idea. Financial systems can only take so much stress before they break. Fixations on transparency are great in principle."

"We have enormous transparency and we have a financial world in collapse. That's not a good situation and we have to use regulators to schedule out losses congruent with accounting so it makes sense for the survival of the system."

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, India’s chief financial planning architect:

"The politics of every society requires government to step in and fix it, so you have no alternative but for governments to step in and try and fix what is an impossible mess."

South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel:

"We have institutions sitting across the globe that were designed for an entirely different era and this impact on the representation. The US still has a veto and impacts on the rules of multilateral institutions and it impacts on the reach."

Lord Levine, former Lloyds chairman:

"As the chairman of Lloyds, we went through a near death experience 20 years ago. We found the solution is boring. Boring is good ... we can't go back. We have got to move forward and it's a new world."