Michael S. Barr: “What we found is that supervisors were essentially too timid and too slow to raise those standards in a timely enough…”

The research shows that there is no basis for the conclusion that low-income or moderate-income households were responsible for causing the financial crisis.

I think it saved a lot of small businesses, households, community banks, and regional banks from a kind of contagion.

I can say the banking system is sound and resilient. I think that was really the right thing to do.

It was our judgment collectively on the Federal Reserve Board, and an unanimous decision of the FDIC and the Treasury Secretary, that we needed to do that to protect contagion from infecting healthy banks in the system.