Collin C. Peterson Quotes

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.

We need to hold Wall Street accountable for issuing the kinds of deceptive loans that nearly brought our economy to its knees in 2008.

Wall Street's biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

Over the objections, where they sound like squealing pigs, over the objections of Romney and all his allies, we passed some of the toughest Wall Street regulations in history, turning Wall Street back into the allocator of capital it always has been and no longer a casino. And they want to repeal it.

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehmans was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.

After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

American business would be run better today if there was more alignment between CEOs' interest and the company. For example, would the financial crisis of 2008 have occurred if the CEO of Lehman and Morgan Stanley and Goldman and Citibank had to take a very small percentage of every mortgage-backed security... or every loan they made?

I believe Wall Street needs serious ongoing regulation.

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

Banks are slowly but surely lending again, and never again will taxpayers foot the bill for Wall Street's excesses. In case we forgot, that was the change we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.

Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals.

With the derivatives market larger than ever, we need way more regulation of Wall Street, not less.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.

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.

In September 2008, the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down.

What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose.

If troubled companies want to explain away 2008 as a 'black swan,' then someone should take responsibility for creating the oil slick that seems to have tarred the entire flock!

It appears that Wall Street is not acting as a force for economic expansion, providing access to capital for companies that make things. Rather, it seems, Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up.