Matt Taibbi Quotes

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

I view the [credit] ratings agencies as one of the key culprits. They were the party that performed the alchemy that converted the securities from F-rated to A-rated. The banks could not have done what they did without the complicity of the ratings agencies.

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.

The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.

Prior to the 2008 recession, many financial institutions were engaging in 'proprietary lending,' where a bank would invest funds for its own gain instead of earning revenue through commission by trading on behalf of clients.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

Today, credit rating agencies rate companies, countries and bonds.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

We need to increase the transparency of shadow banking markets so that authorities can monitor for signs of excessive leverage and unstable maturity transformation outside regulated banks.

If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

Securitization was one of the most brilliant financial innovations of the 20th century. It freed up a lot of capital. If it had been done responsibly, it would have been a wondrous thing because nothing is more stable, there’s nothing safer, than the American mortgage market.... It worked for years. But then people realized they could scam it.

We have institutions that have been allowed to become too big to fail because we had all kinds of flaws in our financial infrastructure, in the whole way over-the-counter derivatives work.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

The financial crisis involved significant failures in the functioning, regulation, and supervision of OTC derivatives markets.

Limiting the destructive risk-taking by large financial firms and banks which are 'too big to fail' is needed.

The billionaire founder of investment firm Elliott Management was one of several investors who warned financial ministers in 2007 that a crack in the housing market could cause huge problems for the banking industry.

Minnesotans lost their jobs because the credit rating agencies didn't do the only job they're supposed to have, the only job they had, which is to give accurate, objective ratings to financial products.

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?

As long as the big banks are allowed to remain big, their political leverage over Washington will remain big. And as long as their political leverage remains big, the taxpayer and economic tab for the next mess they create will be big.

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

As we try to make the financial system safer, we must inevitably confront the problem of moral hazard.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

If a bank's too big so that it can't fail without hurting our economy, well then, it's too big.

It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.