Blackstone CEO: Regulations Have Made Markets ‘Safer,’ ‘Eliminated a lot of Risk’

SCHWARZMAN: "Well, the kind of collapse that we would have had without intervention has an exceptionally low probability of happening in your life-time. And that's because rules have been designed to basically eliminate a lot of risk by reducing leverage in the system by a huge amount. And when you do that, you slow economic growth. You can't shrink banking systems, shrink financial institutions and have countries grow at rates when money was much more plentiful. So, we probably have a safer world, but a world that will grow slower than what we were used to."