Elizabeth Warren Quotes

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

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.

Wall Street's biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.

Created by Congress as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, the CFPB was a direct response to the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession that began with the subprime mortgage debacle and the unraveling of Lehman Brothers investment bank.

Soon after the financial crisis of 2008, I was at a meeting in Washington with a group of U.S. senators. They had invited me to provide a point of view on new regulation; regulation aimed at ensuring we never have to go through the events of 2008 ever again.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

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.

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

Investigating some of the largest subprime lenders - Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Ameriquest, Household Finance - I've seen how their terrible, toxic loans were closed by any means necessary and eventually packaged, sold as securities, and bet upon until they exploded and decimated our economy.

I have been working hard trying to implement Dodd-Frank reforms. We went through a terrible crisis in 2008. Many people lost their homes.

The crash of 2008 was driven in no small part by unfair practices in the mortgage industry which led to many consumers being trapped in loans they didn't understand and couldn't afford.

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.

Once again, the puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn't recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian 'JOBS Act' - a bill that should in fact be called the 'Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.'

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.

I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'

Too big to fail is too big.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

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.

The reality is that what we did in 2010 with the Dodd-Frank wasn't enough.

After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.

Much of the blame for the Great Recession lies with abuses in the housing market - namely the creation of risky and unsustainable home loans that were packaged and sold as quality investments around the globe.

I would drastically revise much of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation, which I call the 'Bureaucrat Full Employment Act.'

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.