Haskell Wexler Quotes

My actual statement during the campaign was I want to be the sheriff of Wall Street, Albany and Main Street. I'm going to go after crime and corruption, wherever it is.

I'm asked, what about criminal prosecution of those on wall street? You know what, it's probably because none of them committed any crimes. They just made some incredibly bad decisions.

I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that there have been serious abuses on Wall Street.

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about.

If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate million in profits - and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits - they do not have much incentive to follow the law.

The justice department spent more time and effort on Barry Bonds than all the financiers and bankers who ripped off the country with their bonds.

That’s typically how the SEC does it. They come in after the crime has been committed they toe-tag the victims, count the bodies, and try to figure out who the crooks were after the fact—which does none of us any good.

Individual bankers are rightly being investigated by the police. I and all colleagues in the chamber hope that if criminality is proven, they will go to jail and bear the same brunt of punishment as any other criminal.

I think what the secretary Hillary Clinton has recognized is the American people are extremely angry about the power of Wall Street, the greed, the illegal behavior of Wall Street.

From 1934 to 1963, the biggest criminals in America ended up on Alcatraz. Nowadays they end up on Wall Street.

I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.

Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.

Yesterday President Obama said, 'We can't continue to treat tax money like monopoly money.' Oh really - how come all those guys on Wall Street got 'get out of jail free' cards?

I think any time you couple the term "Wall Street" with "bailout" or something like that, you know - I don't like what's going on in Wall Street.

I want to say something, and it may sound harsh, not to you, but to the American people. In a sense, in my view, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. It's fraud. I believe that corruption is rampant, and the fact that major bank after major bank has reached multi billion dollar settlements with the United States government when we have a weak regulator system tells me that not only did we have to bail them out once, if we don't start breaking them up, we're going to have to bail them out again, and I do not want to see that happen.

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.

For CNBC, and for Wall Street, billion-dollar fines for violations of the law are just part of the price of doing business, along with litigation costs and 'compliance.'

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.

The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.

If you prosecute a CEO or other senior executive and send him or her to jail for committing a crime, the deterrent effect in my view vastly outweighs even the best compliance program you can put in place.

Wall Street is greedy, reckless and they operate illegally. That's fine. But what do you do?

'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail.

This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.