On the recordJanuary 26, 2010
It is not long since a bunch of avaricious, grasping New York bankers caused a replay of 1929 and a major collapse of the American economy. They were too big to fail, and as a result, this Nation has spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing them out for their wrongdoing. This is intolerable. If we cannot regulate these people, the least we can do is see that they are properly sized. I urge my colleagues to join me in sponsoring the Financial Services Industry Stability Act of 2010, which I am introducing today. As Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said, the institutions too big to fail would be that they would "be sheltered by access to a Federal safety net in time of crisis." Another former Fed Chair, my dear friend Alan Greenspan, said, "If they're too big to fail, they're too big." Similarly, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, opines, "If some banks are thought to be too big to fail, then, in the words of a distinguished economist, they are too big." I urge my colleagues to help me cut down these avaricious scoundrels to proper size.





