Political Quotes

“Mr. President, next Tuesday, July 21, is my wife's birthday, and it is also the 5-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act becoming law. Nearly two decades before that, Barings, an international bank, was destroyed by fraud committed by a single one of their traders. In reality, there were no profits, unbeknownst to many at the time, just big losses that this trader managed to conceal until the firm collapsed. When writing about his actions later in his memoir, the trader said: Luckily for my fraud, there were too many chiefs who would chat about it at arm's length but never go further. And they never dared to ask me any basic questions, since they were afraid of looking stupid about not understanding futures and options. This helps illustrate how we got to that financial crisis. Wall Street so often speaks its own language--one most Americans can't understand and one that prevented consumers and taxpayers and sometimes even participants from asking questions and from challenging Wall Street. September 2008 was preceded by a decade of deregulation, after furious lobbying by the financial industry--lobbying buttressed by obfuscation and deceit, always underscored by greed. Risky behavior was rewarded with gargantuan profits for the firms and multimillion-dollar bonuses for the traders and the executives. Questions were not asked. People often looked the other way. So many were confused and tricked, if you will. Regulators didn't do their jobs.…”