Paul Singer Quotes

Do we have to regulate derivatives? Yes, we do. 'Cause when I did this in my investments, frankly, no one knew who could pay who. But derivatives have an important place in our economy.

It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.

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.

It is wrong when we, in effect, throw safe and sound financial institutions into the same category with banks and lenders that climbed too far out on a limb with no way to return.

While the move to central clearing has made the system safer, we need to make sure that the central counterparties have the resources and risk-management practices to withstand plausible but severe shocks.

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

A bank needs models to measure risk. The problem, however, is that any one bank can measure its risk, but it also has to know what the risk taken by other banks in the system happens to be at any particular moment.

The Federal Reserve has a responsibility to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions and to contain systemic risks in financial markets.

The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

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

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.

Over the objections, where they sound like squealing pigs, over the objections of Romney and all his allies, we passed some of the toughest Wall Street regulations in history, turning Wall Street back into the allocator of capital it always has been and no longer a casino. And they want to repeal it.

I'm afraid sometimes certain individual cases of defaults are unavoidable. What we should do is to step up monitoring, properly handle relevant matters, and ensure there is no regional and systemic financial risk.

I don't want to drive the markets crazy. I don't want to create trouble, but rather order and rules and norms. We have to struggle against financial excesses, those who speculate with sovereign debt, those who develop financial products which have done so much harm.

If our financial industry regarded security the way the health-care sector does, I would stuff my cash in a mattress under my bed.

Global banking’s current structure generates an unjust distribution of risks, where losses are socialized.

I think people have to be very careful with new ideas [in fiancé and economics]. What you need to worry about is when you have something that’s a really good idea, but you get too much of it too fast, like over-the-counter derivatives.

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.

Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion-and-growing trading loss, there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits, and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.

To enable large U.S. banks to support their clients better, the Volcker rule should be clarified.

Bringing back something akin to Glass-Steagall would clearly help limit risk in the system. And that's a very good and worthy goal. Letting banks sell securities and insurance products and services allowed them to grow too big too fast and fueled a culture that put profit and pay over prudence.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

Proprietary trading does not belong in banks with FDIC insurance.

Unfortunately, tools that transfer risk can also increase systemic risk if major counterparties fail to manage their own risk exposures properly.

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