Mitt Romney Quotes

We need to think deeply about whether we can sustain banks that are not only too big to fail, but potentially too big to bail.

Since 1840 the United States has had 12 systemic banking crises and Canada has had none …. It all has to do with politics.

Where human lives are concerned, time is always short, yet the world has witnessed the vast resources that governments can draw upon to rescue financial institutions deemed 'too big to fail.'

The idea that the largest banks in the world would simultaneously fail, need government support, government guarantees, and/or government intervention to survive was not in my range of realistic scenarios.

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

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 too-big-to-fail reform project is massive in scope. In my view, it holds real promise. But the project will take years to complete. Success is not assured.

The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007?

The fact that the government had to put up hundreds of billions of dollars to Citibank in guarantees was a public declaration that Citibank was a mess. Making Citibank go through financial restructuring would not have conveyed any more different information. So it's very hard to see why it would have had that kind of a panic if it were done well.

When government is... bailing out banks... we have every good reason to be alarmed.

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

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.

People think when you have a, quote, 'bank failure,' that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily.

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.

Governments need to be authorized to provide 'open bank assistance.' The convolutions of Dodd-Frank aimed at 'avoiding' this tactic are ludicrous and will prove to be extremely costly to the system.

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

I would like to thank the Cypriot people for their maturity and collectedness shown in their interactions with the Cypriot Banks.

What Obama is saying is simple: The United States has become Too Big To Fail.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.

I'm really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.

Governments should ensure the adequate capitalization of domestic banks, so that these banks won’t have to be bailed out by the IMF [International Monetary Fund].

Too big to fail is too big.