Steve Eisman Quotes

In a moment of stress, funding may go to systemically-important firms, which could pull funding away from firms not making the cut.

Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.

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

No bank should be too big or too complex to fail, but almost any bank is too big to liquidate quickly, particularly in the midst of a crisis.

What people don't realize is that China papered over its last two credit bubbles, those in 1999 and 2004. The banks were never bailed out - they just exchanged their bad loans for questionable bonds from quasi-state organizations.

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

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

To restore confidence in our markets and our financial institutions so they can fuel continued growth and prosperity, we must address the underlying problem. The federal government must implement a program to remove these illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy.

There's something called, 'resolution authority,' which gives the government the power to takeover a failing bank - something they didn't have pre-Lehman Brothers.

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.

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.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

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.

The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.

We support too big to fail. We want the government to be able to take down a big bank like JP Morgan and it could be done. We think Dodd-Frank, which we supported parts of, gave the FDIC the authority to take down a big bank.

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.

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.

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences.

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.

If banks anticipate government will come to the rescue should the credit market go badly awry, they may make loans that would otherwise be imprudent, e.g. subprime loans with little prospect of repayment.

You shouldn't be trying to create a system where no bank fails, but you should be creating one that catches a bank and allows it to fail without impacting the financial markets.

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.

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

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.