Political Quotes

“My point is, I will offer an amendment that would actually require it at the front end, simply saying, if we have a category that is described as too big to fail, meaning this is too large an organization to be allowed to fail, which in my lexicon is no- fault capitalism, if they are now at such a size that they are too big to fail, they pose a moral hazard, a grave threat and risk to the economy, if they were to fail, then I say do as we have done on some other occasions. We broke up Standard Oil into 26 parts, and it turns out the value of the parts was substantially greater than the value of the whole. It turned out to be a pretty wonderful thing. We broke up AT&T for other reasons. I am not rushing to try to break up anybody, but if we are serious about describing that which we think creates substantial, additional risk in the future, then we should take action to eliminate those kinds of risks, if the risk is, in this case, too big to fail. I would like to get rid of the category of too big to fail. The Federal Reserve Board has had such a category for a long time. We have always known that if one is too big to fail, they are at a significant advantage to virtually every other financial institution. They can do business. They can take risks, but they can't fail. They are too big to fail and, competing with them, they have a safety net.…”