Steve Mnuchin Quotes

It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.

I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Today, even small entities that trade complex instruments or are granted sufficient leverage can threaten the global financial system.

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

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

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.

Don't act like a bank unless you are a bank. That was a really big lesson learned from 2008.

Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion-and-growing trading loss, there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits, and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.

To enable large U.S. banks to support their clients better, the Volcker rule should be clarified.

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

The Bankers' New Clothes makes a simple, powerful argument: that banks need to raise more capital. It is entirely persuasive that the extent of their leverage makes the financial system fragile, and it clearly and patiently demolishes all the counter-arguments made by the banks and their lobbyists.

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

I do believe that banks are special - they are very leveraged institutions by nature; therefore, it's even more critical to ensure that the governance and the process of running a banking company are well-organised, managed and regulated.

For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system.

The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

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.

One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.

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

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.

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.

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.

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.

The Commission concludes that, as massive losses spread throughout the financial system …, many institutions failed, or would have failed but for government bailouts. As panic gripped the market, credit markets seized up, trading ground to a halt, and the stock market plunged. Lack of transparency contributed greatly to the crisis: the exposures of financial institutions to risky mortgage assets and other potential losses were unknown to market participants, and indeed many firms did not know their own exposures.

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.