Barack Obama Quotes

Let's not forget, what TARP did allowed us to move overnight and put capital into hundreds of banks, and that money came back plus $32 billion.

Overpaying the banks for their toxic assets could contribute capital, but that may not be politically feasible or attractive.

People forget... that we structured it so that the government, or the people, would be repaid with a really good rate of return. And as it turns out, that aspect of TARP, that's what happened.

I don't want the federal government to rush in and bail the out right away.

The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.

When I left the Treasury, there was a poll that showed - and I don't remember the numbers exactly right - something like 90% of the people were against TARP. It prevented a disaster, but you don't get credit for a disaster that people don't see.

Liberty never had to file bankruptcy, thanks to God's blessings, but we did go through tough times and painful debt restructuring in the 1990s.

The TARP program was nevertheless necessary to keep banks from collapsing in a cascade of failures.

Governor Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit.

Well, I feel that we're kind of fortunate that this book gives the whole world a lesson in economics and how to get out of the mess that we're all in. It's basic message is to try and stop spending as much and try to release some of your assets to pay off your debt.

The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.

When this crisis began, crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world's biggest companies - companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars in assets - took place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night. We should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution or forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.

One of the very difficult parts of the decision I made on the financial crisis was to use hardworking people's money to help prevent there to be a crisis.

The federal government... announced a plan to spend, like, a trillion of taxpayer dollars to buy out bad mortgages and debt. Wall Street was surprisingly enthusiastic about the plan to save their (butts) with other peoples' money. It was either that, or Sarah Palin's idea to sell it all on eBay.

The fact that the government had to put up hundreds of billions of dollars to Citibank in guarantees was a public declaration that Citibank was a mess. Making Citibank go through financial restructuring would not have conveyed any more different information. So it's very hard to see why it would have had that kind of a panic if it were done well.

When government is... bailing out banks... we have every good reason to be alarmed.

I passionately disagreed with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan to bail out the banks by using a public fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help banks take toxic assets off their balance sheets. I argued that it would be much better to put the money where the hole was and replenish the equity of the banks themselves.

No bank should be too big or too complex to fail, but almost any bank is too big to liquidate quickly, particularly in the midst of a crisis.

The idea that the largest banks in the world would simultaneously fail, need government support, government guarantees, and/or government intervention to survive was not in my range of realistic scenarios.

The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks.

It's hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.

Chet Edwards votes for every bailout and against ending any bailout!

When the banks grow to or when these financial institutions grow to such a size that they can't sustain themselves, or what have you, they have problems, economic problems, or financial problems, they shouldn't be able to look back to you and I, the taxpayer, to be bailed out.

We need the government to force the banks to write down all their bad assets now and then recapitalize themselves, preferably with private capital. Those banks that cannot raise sufficient capital should be seized and their deposits sold off.