On the recordMay 4, 2010
The statistics are really frightening in what has happened with Wall Street. If you take a look, what is really happening is Wall Street is not making loans, and many of the small banks, the community banks, don't have the capital to make the loans, so the capital is being tied up in these huge banks. So what we are really looking to do as part of this reform is to push the capital down to the local banks, down to the Main Street banks, so that they can make loans to people. However, if you take a look at the large banks, the leading United States banks in 2009, they reduced the number of loans that they made by 7.4 percent. It was the steepest drop in lending by the large banks since 1942, and that was the beginning of World War II. The 22 firms that received the most bailout money, this is the Wall Street bailout money, cut small business loans by $12 billion in 2009. Meanwhile, and this was the point you were making a moment ago, the top 38 largest financial firms gave out $145 billion in record pay to their employees in 2009. That was an 18 percent increase from 2008, which was also a very high year. So what is happening here is that Wall Street's philosophy seems to be all about greed for them and poverty for the rest of the Nation. That has got to end. What we need is this reform of Wall Street. We need to put in place very clear rules: No more games with derivatives. If you are a banker, you are a banker. You are not a loan shark on the street selling a bad loan.
