Bill Foster Quotes

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.

Too big to fail is too big.

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.'

When this crisis began, crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world's biggest companies - companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars in assets - took place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night. We should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution or forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.

I don't think anybody's too big to fail. I think the - I think if what you've got is sort of a large number of institutions who are going to fail, then that ends up affecting the system.

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

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.

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

No single housing finance institution should be too big to fail.

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.

When the banks grow to or when these financial institutions grow to such a size that they can't sustain themselves, or what have you, they have problems, economic problems, or financial problems, they shouldn't be able to look back to you and I, the taxpayer, to be bailed out.

Too few people in my old field of financial services were ever brought to book for their part in the 2008 crash.

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.

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.

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.

There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

If you were approaching the TARP investments from a pure investment standpoint, then there's no doubt in my mind the taxpayer lost, and probably lost big.

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

If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.

In truth, it's not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.'s derivatives deals - firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Barclays and UBS.

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them.