Regulatory Negligence Quotes

We thought we would get around to it sometime down the line. Theoretically we could have regulated it, but it wasn't on our radar screen.

I think that the S.E.C. has been pretty feckless when it comes to reigning in reckless behavior on Wall Street.

The BP spill was the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Yet somehow, gas companies like BP and Halliburton ran interference on reporting that story.

I know that it would not shock you to discover that this isn’t the first time that Congress and the regulatory agencies did not act in the public interest.

The Environmental Protection Agency rarely follows up prosecuting coal companies and their fellow polluters, even when the evidence is clear-cut that they are dumping and poisoning entire towns near their projects, and the state regulators are even worse.

If the Board of Trade or Local Government Board managed their business after the fashion of the Foreign Office and Colonial Office, you and I should deserve to be hung.

In 1985 five Senators had received contributions from Lincoln Savings and Loan, and had interceded on the bank's behalf with federal regulators. The same request was made of the governor who refused. You don't intervene in the regulatory process. It's law enforcement. It's like a parent ... calling the police chief to say, "Don't touch my kid." It's wrong. [The Senators' efforts delayed the closure of the bank, costing the taxpayers billions of dollars.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

We know that BP cuts safety corners, takes risks, and is unconcerned about anything other than their own profit.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.

My experiences with … SEC officials proved to be a systemic disappointment and led me to conclude that the SEC securities lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed.

The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.