Political Quotes

“Mr. President, yesterday President Obama made some recommendations that have caused quite a stir, especially on the morning shows on television today. The President suggested something that is called radical by some of the commentators: he suggested that banks--commercial banks, FDIC-insured banks, insured by the American taxpayers--should not be essentially gambling or investing in risky instruments, risky securities on their own proprietary accounts. It has been going on for a long time. This President said let's stop that. We have seen such a financial wreck, in which our economy was steered right into the ditch, where something like $15 trillion of value had been lost by American households. The President said we need to make some fundamental changes. One change, which isn't even, in my judgment, a significant change--at least not in the context of what must be done and should be done--is to limit the ability of FDIC-insured financial institutions to invest in, speculate in, and buy and trade derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. That should not have been going on at all. Fifteen years ago, I wrote the cover story for the Washington Monthly magazine on this very subject. The title of the article was ``Very Risky Business.'' I talked then about how FDIC-insured banks in this country were trading on their own proprietary accounts in derivatives-- $16 trillion of value in derivatives at that time.…”