Political Quotes

“Mr. President, earlier this month, the Fed released the results of its annual stress test--exercises designed to ensure that the largest banks can withstand economic shocks and will not need another taxpayer bailout in the event of a crisis. These stress tests were not in effect a decade ago before the last crisis and likely would have prevented--or made much softer--the economic landing that we had. What happened with these annual stress tests that just came out illustrates exactly what is wrong with Washington, what is wrong with this Congress, and what is wrong with Wall Street. The Fed allowed the seven largest banks to redirect $96 billion--that is 96 thousand million--that should be used to pay workers, reduce fees for consumers, or protect taxpayers from bailouts. Instead, it allowed the seven largest banks to plow that money into share buybacks and dividends to reward wealthy executives and generally wealthy investors. Two banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, had capital below the required amounts. That is right. Those banks failed the test, but they got passing grades anyway. The Fed called them up, let them haggle over the test results, and allowed them to proceed with buybacks and dividends that drained their required capital. In what classroom in America would a teacher grade a paper and preliminarily give it an F and then negotiate with the student over test results and then say, OK, you passed?…”