Bank Bailout Quotes

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with the 2008 crisis. And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.

The government, of course, will print money to bail out the banks' uncovered casino bets, but not to bail out the elderly from the theft of their funds.

Financial institutions are not being bailed out as a favor to them or their stockholders. In fact, stockholders have come out worse off after some bailouts. The real point is to avoid a major contraction of credit that could cause major downturns in output and employment, ruining millions of people, far beyond the financial institutions involved. If it was just a question of the financial institutions themselves, they could be left to sink or swim. But it is not.

The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks.

Some people say that we can’t afford to help our kids through school by keeping student loan interest rates low. But … the federal government offers far lower interest rates on loans, every single day–they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a big bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve … at a rate of about 0.75%. … a student who is trying to get a loan to go to college will pay almost 7%. … the federal government is going to charge students interest rates that are nine times higher than the rates for the biggest banks–-the same banks that destroyed millions of jobs and nearly broke this economy. That isn’t right.

The whole banking sector in Mexico was literally bankrupt. For whatever reason, instead of intervening in the sector or supporting the banks, the government expropriated them. We went through the very laborious period of selling the failing banks to the wealthy people of Mexico.

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

See where Congress passed a two billion dollar bill to relieve bankers' mistakes. You can always count on us helping those who have lost part of their fortune, but our whole history records nary a case where the loan was for the man who had absolutely nothing. Our theory is to help only those who can get along, even if they don't get a loan.

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.

Obama came in and gave $700 billion to the bankers off the top as opposed to giving $700 billion to the poor.

I'll tell you where the injustice is. It's with the person earning £12,000 to £15,000-a-year who is being asked to be restrained by their business or employer. Yet the taxpayer has bailed out the banks, so why are they not showing restraint?

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.

Public anger over bank bailouts was as much about fairness as the billions of dollars spent.

Deutsche Bank is a problem bank.

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.

When I left the Treasury, there was a poll that showed - and I don't remember the numbers exactly right - something like 90% of the people were against TARP. It prevented a disaster, but you don't get credit for a disaster that people don't see.

All taxpayers feel a tremendous sense of frustration as they see many tens of billions of dollars of bonuses paid to the same mega banks that were on the brink of bankruptcy and were only saved by massive government rescue money and support. We are not satisfied by the fact that many of them have paid the money back, nor should we be.

Goldman Sachs was fundamentally responsible for the crash of 2008, but by that time its former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Henry 'Hank' Paulson, had been installed as US Treasury Secretary to begin the bank bail out policy, with enormous benefit to Goldman Sachs, in the closing weeks of the Bush administration. Goldman Sachs was also instrumental in the collapse of the economy in Greece that started the 'euro panic' that later engulfed Ireland.

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.

On any measure, Spain's bank rescue has been a disaster. A hundred million euros have been added to the national debt, ten-year bonds are at a record high and the country's credit rating has been downgraded three notches.

The Irish turned in on themselves and bid up their own land prices in the most extraordinary ways... The Irish people stepped in and guaranteed the banks, and committed to repay sums they can't afford to repay, and essentially committed themselves to generations of suffering.

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.

Beside the two wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promised to end, a financial crisis at home had pushed the United States to the brink of another Great Depression. When we spoke with the new president in March of 2009, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month, the government was throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at failing banks, and the auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Politically pummeled from all sides, Obama did his best to keep a sense of humor.

When government is... bailing out banks... we have every good reason to be alarmed.