P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

Businesses have no place being 'too big to fail.'

The financial system is drifting back to business as usual a bit to quickly …. We are starting to see risky behavior of the sort that people were scared of after the crises

Banks too big to fail are too big to be regulated or controlled by the Federal Government.

The actions taken by central banks and other authorities to stabilize a panic in the short run can work against stability in the long run if investors and firms infer from those actions that they will never bear the full consequences of excessive risk-taking.

Regulation is necessary, particularly in a sector, like the banking sector, which exposes countries and people to a risk.

Taking away the risk from the financial sector and taking it on to the public shoulders is not the right approach.

If we didn't have greed, market economies wouldn't be as innovative as they are. But in my view, greed has to be contained by the fear of losses, so there has to be a system where, if you take too much risk, you go into bankruptcy. You don't systematically bail out people who take excessive risks.

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.

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

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

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

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

As Americans, we shouldn't like bailouts. Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they're going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn't have the taxpayer pay for the losses.

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.

Fannie Mae may have conformed to the rules but the rules didn’t conform to reality. A major bank or financial institution could meet every single regulatory requirement yet still be at the risk of collapse.

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.

There are some outcomes in finance we don't want, and government should regulate that.

We must limit the perception that some institutions are either too big or too interconnected to fail.

Complexity and interconnectedness matter as much as size in assessing risk in banking.

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can't get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.

It's hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.

As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of '08 was a sin of omission - less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism.

The idea that either individuals or organisations are 'too big to fail' or that the tech and start-up sector is somehow different is wrong.

Proprietary trading does not belong in banks with FDIC insurance.

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