Political Quotes

“Exactly. I say to Senator Kaufman, you made a point maybe 5 minutes ago that some of the smartest people in the country are working on Wall Street. There is a huge incentive for smart people to go to Wall Street and be creative and invent new financial instruments to stay, in many ways, a step ahead of the regulators, in some sense, a step ahead of the ``sheriff,'' if you will. Those regulators, who are paid probably one-tenth or one-hundredth-- regulators are paid decent middle-class salaries that most Americans would be very happy with. But some of these very smart people on Wall Street are paid 100 times, 1,000 times--millions, tens of millions of dollars, and there is a huge incentive for them to figure out how to stay ahead of the regulators. That is why it is so important that we have strong regulators. We always work to do that, and we have good regulators. It is important that a President appoint people who have the public interest in mind, which Presidents have not always done in the last decade. It is important that we write different rules, and that is exactly what we want to do to keep these banks from being so big. We had problems with rating agencies that gamed the system. We had problems with mortgage brokers. We had problems with Wall Street.”