a paper tiger that will fall apart the minute it is tested in a real life financial crisis

In the words of Ben Bernanke, America was on a course for 'a cataclysm that could have rivaled or surpassed the Great Depression.'

we have got to get away from this too-big-to-fail. It is bad in so many different ways in terms of the concept.

It's only fitting that, at a crisis past, a government should set aside its crisis authorities.

The panic of 2008 has subsided, but it has been replaced by the gnawing pain of countless men and women who can't find work, who can't keep their homes, and who don't know whether their economic story will ever end in recovery.

Nothing in life that is worthwhile is easy.

I do not want people sitting around in their office on Wall Street saying, Well, you know, we have kind of been doing this, and it has kind of worked for us, so we are going to keep doing it.

We write the laws. And so we can change the laws.

the two most important things we have as a country is democracy and free markets.

We have developed a cooperation program at the SEC where we can now offer reduced sanctions in exchange for insiders who come forward and provide us with information.

If criminal conduct contributed to the financial meltdown, then the people responsible should be investigated, prosecuted, and sent to prison.

Is it legal for a firm to manufacture and sell securities which it knows or is virtually certain are going to default?

But as a general matter, I think that you cannot be cowed by the possibility of losing, and we do enough good things and bring enough good cases that we can take a few losses if the cause is right.

I do not want a single innocent person to go to jail or be criminally indicted for any reason.

Widespread cheating and fraud of the sort that drove the speculative housing and derivatives securities bubbles are anathema to public confidence in the markets.

I think this is all the ability to know you just cannot have two different sets of rules for people, and if you are powerful and you have got money and you have got good accountants and good lawyers, you can get away with something that…

I think disclosure is really the root of a lot of these problems.

That is not an option, and I do not know any serious thinker on either side of the political divide or the ideological divide that believes that we can do away with regulators and do away with regulations.

There is only one level of justice in this country, whether you are very, very wealthy and have a strong, complex legal team or whether you are someone else.

I think there is a lot of upset about what happened in the great securities meltdown, the loss of jobs, and the people losing their homes.

You are one standard, bright, consistent star that we know we can always turn to.

I'm not for spending one more dollar or one more American life until we have a conviction that we can get governance that's good enough.

How do you hold them accountable if they're not going to do it?

At what point do we say that we can't make this work?