We went for the IMF meetings and when we met with investors, they asked us: ‘what is happening? We understand that there was some financial mismanagement in the CBN.’ It was humiliating.

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.

In general terms institutions have lost their credibility, not because they don't operate but rather because they operate behind closed doors; they have not been opened to the Chilean people. The national congress has been a closed space for many years, the binomial system has contained it within two political forces and it does not represent ideas calling for transformations, which have been present in our country for many years.

As trust crumbles, the overall stability of the market is jeopardised.

The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

All my trust in the politicians had been rubbed away.

Our reputation has been hurt very badly in the last few years. We've had a go-it-alone mentality in a world where because of communications and transportation, you should be going exactly in the other direction.

The minute insured or uninsured people feel, and companies feel they can't trust our banks, we lose our place as the reserve currency. We lose our place as the destination for commerce.

That's the embarrassment. The embarrassment is that I'm given credibility in this world, because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does. Not because I have an ideological agenda.

[I]n a matter of weeks you lost the confidence of the financial markets, the electorate and your own MPs.

The credibility of the world that based itself on citizenship, on responsibility, on power, on equality, on need, claim, and entitlement – the credibility of these as ideals to which it is worthwhile to consecrate your life is declining, and, in my opinion, very fast. I want to suggest the possibility of seeing this as the end of an epoch, just like the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine, and as an entirely new access/credibility/ease of moving into the world of conspiratio, knowing that it can’t be contractually insured, that it’s a renunciation of insurance.

Credibility lasts about two cycles of bad material, and then you’ll probably never get it back. If you let people down, that’s really hard to come back from– harder than climbing from nothing to something, even.

The loss of trust is paralyzing.

With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that “the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the trust, are long gone — gone, surely, with Watergate, but gone before that.… After Lyndon Johnson, after the ugly war that consumed him, trust in ‘the President’ was tarnished forever.” That tarnishing revolutionized politics and government in the United States. The shredding of the delicate yet crucial fabric of credence and faith between the people of the United States and the man they had placed in the White House occurred during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.