Gary Weiss Quotes

As with products on supermarket shelves, the public has a right to know where their financial products and services come from.

It is certainly for the public good to keep all the banks competitors for our favors by a judicious distribution of them and thus to engage the individuals who belong to them in support of the reformed order of things or at least in an acquiescence under it.

The public must find a way avoid the damage caused by a majority who neither has the ability or the desire to legislate.

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.

There are elements of Dodd-Frank that clearly need to be curtailed.

Make the financial industry pay for its mistakes. That's the idea behind the best of the Obama administration's reform proposals: If banks issue securities backed by mortgages, say, then require them to hold some of that paper so that they will bear some of the losses.

I don't support going back to Glass-Steagall as is.

I have and will continue to oppose any legislation that would undermine the important consumer protections provided under Dodd-Frank.

The administration will look at Glass-Steagall and what I referred to as the 21st-century Glass-Steagall as part of regulatory reform.

We survived for hundreds of years under the old banking structure. You'd have clearing banks, then merchant banks doing the racy stuff, and then building societies where you'd join a waiting list for a mortgage. But then banks started buying stockbrokers, doing mortgages, and you ended up with these big banking groups doing everything.

We have legislated to protect the public from tax rises and guarantee incomes for pensioners, so enshrining in law more protections for consumers, commuters and investors is possible. Enshrining these rights into law would mean that any future government which wanted to reverse this would have to go through the primary legislative process.

I don't think that the financial services industry and that banking in particular are any different than any other part of the economy, any other industry outside banking.

There are parts [in Dodd-Frank] that I don't agree with. But, in total, it is what it is.

Democrats are ready, willing, and able to provide regulatory relief for community banks and credit unions.

Over the past 7 years, we've tried to modernize the economy, and today what we're doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated walls, and granting banks significant new authority.

I would say that folks who have looked at this issue for a long time, whether it's Elizabeth Warren or many other economists, will tell you that right now, yes, we do need a 21st century Glass-Steagall legislation.

The credit card companies have put the loan sharks out of business.

A lot of these things have hurt the average American. When they look at the banks and they say, "Well, the bank's talking its own game," I am telling you, what we've done in mortgage lending, our inability to have proper regulations around mortgages, has hurt average Americans. First-time buyers, immigrant buyers, prior defaults, self-employed, because they can't get a mortgage. Will it make a big difference to JPMorgan Chase? No, but you're hurting my fellow citizens. Let's go at it, and let's fix it.

The media, when it's functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things.

I wouldn't in any way say I distanced myself from Wall Street.

The financial service industry has an image issue.

Some of my colleagues are unwilling to vote for any Dodd-Frank reforms, partly out of the political fear that any reforms will be seen as reducing regulations on the financial sector.

The number one problem with Dodd-Frank is it's way too complicated, and it cuts back lending, so we want to strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevent banks from lending, and that will be the number one priority on the regulatory side.

If you ever had the misfortune of reading all 2,000 pages of Dodd-Frank, which I have done - and it almost killed me - basically, all it does is create a list of all the things it wants the Fed to fix.

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