Regulatory Oversight Quotes

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

My view was that government officials could not sit on the board of the central bank, and I am very happy that has been upheld.

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

The major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of blame for the crisis.

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.

Strong banks want strong regulation.

One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.

Critics might contend that putting former private-sector CEOs in the president's Cabinet places the fox in the henhouse. But it's unlikely such executives would expose themselves to the headaches if they weren't genuinely motivated by the call to service.

A focus on regulatory overreach, things that the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost, is probably the single greatest opportunity we have for having a positive impact on job creation.

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.

There is so much we don't know about Facebook. We know we have a corporate monopoly that has repeated serious violations that are threatening our democracy.

I don't want to create a too-big-to-fail player.

Although the Fed has subjected banks’ portfolios to stress tests to measure the effect of rising interest rates and investment losses, the results might not have shown the whole picture: U.S. banks, particularly small and medium-sized ones, may not have enough capital to maintain solvency and liquidity should their risky loans and investments fail in large numbers. The same is true of the stress tests that the ECB has performed in Europe,

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.

It’s very hard to write regulations that will prevent people from acting foolishly—particularly when acting foolishly has recently made them a lot of money.

Anybody who covers Washington and Wall Street knows that there is an awesome amount of self-dealing, most of it perfectly legal.

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.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

The creation of a consumer agency, structured similarly to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, levels the playing field. It gives consumers a powerful advocate at the federal level.

This is not the time for knee jerk populist reactions to problems. These will only discourage foreign investment and make matters worse.

The nanny state

Big business does not want honest government.