Maria Cantwell Quotes

Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.

The financial sector is vital to the economy. A well-functioning financial sector promotes job creation, innovation, and inclusive economic growth.

But our system of regulation must keep up with this. If it fails to keep up, it will hold back economic expansion. We need financial market regulation that works at national and European level.

Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.

Wall Street has desperate need of men like you.

Since 1840 the United States has had 12 systemic banking crises and Canada has had none …. It all has to do with politics.

As much as the banking system may not be terribly popular, it is an essential part of the economy.

Banks operate like a man who either wears his trousers round his chest, stifling breathing, as now, or round his ankles, exposing his assets. We want their trousers tied round their middle: steady lending growth; particularly to productive British business, especially small scale enterprise.

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

Our Government is committed to pursuing policies and programs which facilitate a further lowering of the interest rates in order to fuel investment and growth. We call on the commercial banks to partner with us in this effort.

If you look at 2009, why did the recovery happen? Recovery happened because somebody in the world's largest economy opened the tap: the U.S., followed by Europe and now Japan.

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

Banks are slowly but surely lending again, and never again will taxpayers foot the bill for Wall Street's excesses. In case we forgot, that was the change we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.

Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich supported the Wall Street bailout.

There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role.

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

And taking more money out of the private economy and having the government perform as it has poorly done with the stimulus I don't think is the right way to go.

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.

I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'

The normal half-brained politician sometimes doesn't understand capital markets.