Elizabeth Warren

I think it would be hard to make the case that we can see some date in the immediate future when Citi will not be too big to fail.

Instead of that, why don't you concentrate on breaking Citi into more pieces, so that no one piece is too big to fail?

Citi continues to pose significant systemic risk. In fact, Citi is often cited as the poster child for 'too big to fail.'

Can I shrink that up? It's not all U.S. businesses.

We have to have $700 billion or the economy will fail.

The March 4 hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel will come to order.

We are concerned about the financial system. We're concerned that no institution should be able to present significant risk to the financial system.

What does 'healthy' mean now that it didn't mean on October 14, 2008?

It is really three different kinds of businesses combined: a commercial bank, an investment bank, and an insurance company.

As everyone in this room knows, in late 2008 a financial crisis threatened to bring the worldwide economy to its knees.

The market clearly perceives that there is a too big to fail guarantee, and the market is rating Citi higher because of that.

I understand it's one factor, but can we both stipulate it's a very helpful factor?

I want to know if the American taxpayer gets paid for that.

You wiped out all of its equity, you caused its debt to have to take a haircut, and that's what helped put it back on firm footing.

I've always believed that people misunderstood TARP. We should not be dancing in the street because banks have repaid their TARP funds.

Going from $21 billion to $3 billion doesn't look like it fixed itself and that it only started coming back once TALF was in place, a TARP program.

Without GMAC, GM was unlikely to survive?

So, right now, your business model is that you have the exclusive right to sell, in effect, zero percent financing on GM cars.

You left the equity intact, all of the debt continued to be repaid at 100 cents on the dollar; a far better deal to have been an investor in GMAC than to have been an investor in GM.

No matter how many taxpayer dollars we pumped in.

So, what I'd like to start with is--I just want to make sure I understand the business model.

So, the notion that somehow we save money by propping up a weaker, more impaired company than we do by cleaning it up and putting it on the block just doesn't add up for me.

Well, but if we're talking about time, I mean, I presume the possibility of a quick 363 sale, as happened in the auto industry, could have made this a relatively speedy procedure----

If it had been up to me, I would have told the banks, all of them including GMAC, 'Take the TARP money, charge it off.'

All right, so GM is offering, in effect, to pay a portion of the consumer's finance cost.