Noam Chomsky Quotes

Taxpayers have put more than $24 trillion on the line to resuscitate Wall Street after the economic meltdown of last year. With the help of this massive taxpayer support, the nation's largest banks are posting record profits.

I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.

As American citizens, if you believe all banks were bailed out, you would hate banks. I would, too.

As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

We talk about institutions that are too big to fail - I think the story is as much about people who think they are too big to fail.

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.

I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual. I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars.

Too big to fail is too big.

From time to time, capitalism has a tendency to implode.

Banks and other financial institutions found that it was often impossible to obtain market prices for mortgage-backed securities and other risky assets. Not knowing the value of their own portfolios, they could not judge the solvency and liquidity of other financial institutions either. As a result, they were unwilling to lend to them, and the financial system ground to a halt.

Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

What we're seeing now is that greed is still alive and kicking, and banks are bigger than ever.

I supported some very, very objectionable things in terms of bailouts or rescues, but I did it not for Wall Street, but for the American people.

I think, with Hank Paulson, the concept of a bailout was anathema to him from day one. He was a Republican; he's a free marketeer. He believes in capitalism, and part of capitalism is believing in failure. And so the idea of bailing out an institution, I think, went against every part of him.

You can't look back at the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes that started in 2008 and not have some important lessons about the critical nature of oversights in financial markets and institutions.

Most Ohioans would be surprised to know that the same Wall Street megabanks which received bailouts from taxpayers in 2009 also receive taxpayer-funded advantages today simply because of their 'too big to fail' status.

It's better to have the taxpayer pay for the losses than have the United States of America become an economic wasteland. If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

In a moment of stress, funding may go to systemically-important firms, which could pull funding away from firms not making the cut.

I think that if you're going after large banks and large financial companies to try to make sure people are being treated fairly, you're going to make some enemies, and you're going to make people uncomfortable.

When the banks grow to or when these financial institutions grow to such a size that they can't sustain themselves, or what have you, they have problems, economic problems, or financial problems, they shouldn't be able to look back to you and I, the taxpayer, to be bailed out.

Wall Street banks have used the same tactic that Bush used in the war on terror - fear - and they've basically said that if you don't do what we tell you, the sky will fall. If you don't do what we tell you, it will be the end of capitalism as we know it. The failure of Lehman Brothers lent some credence to those fears.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.

Unbridled capitalism will lead to some very real problems.

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.