Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I have come to speak in support of the Sanders amendment. I am intrigued by my colleague's presentation, so I will respond to a bit of it. There are a couple of areas where we agree and some where I profoundly disagree, but let me start with the agreement. When my colleague says, If you are too big to fail, you are too big and you ought to get smaller, I fully agree with that. I have an amendment that says if you are too big to fail--judged by the council in this bill that you are too big to fail, at that point you require the breaking up or the paring back of whatever is necessary of that institution to bring it below the level at which its failure would cause a moral jeopardy or an unacceptable risk to this country's entire economy. If we end this process and too big to fail still exists--that is, we have companies that are, in fact, too big to fail--then we will have failed, in my judgment. Too big to fail means you are too big. We have broken up Standard Oil into 23 pieces and it turns out that 23 pieces are more valuable than the whole. AT&T was broken up. I am not interested in breaking up companies for the sake of it, but I am saying this: We know what has happened. This chart shows what has happened to the largest financial institutions in this country. It shows that with respect to assets and liabilities, the top six commercial financial institutions in this country have gotten bigger, bigger, bigger, and much, much, much bigger.…”