Political Quotes

“Mr. President, when you look at Wall Street and you look at the relationship between far too many Senators and Wall Street, that is what got us into this mess. For the last 10 years the deregulation of the Bush administration, the people they appointed to watch, such as the head of mine safety in the Bush years was a mining executive, we paid the price for that, the people in my State, people in West Virginia. Too often families pay the price for a government not aggressive enough to regulate mine safety. We paid the price in this country because we didn't have a government aggressive enough to make the banks and Wall Street behave. That is why they were able to overreach. That is why the legislation Senator Kaufman and I are introducing, with Senators Casey, Whitehouse, Merkley, and others, will address the issue of too big to fail. Too big to fail is not what you do if these banks are in trouble, how you pull them apart when they are about to fail, and we want to make sure we don't spend taxpayer dollars to bail them out. We make sure they don't hurt the whole financial system. Too big to fail means don't let them get too big. Even Alan Greenspan, hardly an ally in regulating the banking system, says too big to fail means too big. That is what Senator Kaufman and I are addressing in our legislation. Let me give some numbers. Fifteen years ago, the six largest U.S. banks had assets equal to 17 percent, one-seventh. Fifteen years ago, the six largest U.S.…”