John Garamendi: “It's really very, very important that we do focus on the community banks. This is Main Street. This is where the small…”

“It's really very, very important that we do focus on the community banks. This is Main Street. This is where the small businessman--the men and women that own the local grocery store, the shop, the person who is the carpenter, the painter, this is where they will get the money that they need, the loan that they need to carry on their business. It's the community banks. But what has happened in America over the last decade is a concentration of economic strength in the hands of just a few. A very, very few of the large banks, Wall Street banks now, control 80 percent or more of the American financial strength. We need to take that into account, not only because it will give the community banks an opportunity to compete and to have capital available to them so that they can make those loans, but also because of this problem of too big to fail. Too big to fail. That's what happened over the course from 2000--maybe beginning in the nineties--until 2008, when the great collapse occurred. The banks grew bigger and bigger and fewer and fewer so that at one point just a handful controlled most of the financial assets of America. And they grossly mismanaged those assets. AIG, a famous name. Lehman Brothers, another bankrupt company. All of the games that they played, those roosters came home to roost and the droppings were on American homeowners and the hardworking men and women of America that lost their jobs as a result of Wall Street excesses.”