John Yarmuth: “I had the privilege in the last Congress to be a member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee when all of…”

“I had the privilege in the last Congress to be a member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee when all of this was unfolding, in the fall of 2008 when for the first time people were getting a sense that Wall Street was essentially operating like an unregulated casino. It was essentially the Wild West of finance. And my economics training, as skimpy as it may have been, taught me that the financial system in our capitalist form of government, in our free market, is supposed to help with the allocation of capital in its most productive way so that capital finds its most productive uses. And what we found looking at these incidents as they unfolded back in 2008 and as we have seen even up until the last couple of weeks is that the giants of the financial system in this country, Goldman Sachs, the other major Wall Street financial institutions, weren't guiding capital to its most productive use. They were guiding capital, hoarding capital, accumulating enormous sums of capital, in some cases essentially creating capital out of the ether, and deploying it for their own very greedy use.”