Sherrod Brown Quotes

Taxpayers have put more than $24 trillion on the line to resuscitate Wall Street after the economic meltdown of last year. With the help of this massive taxpayer support, the nation's largest banks are posting record profits.

The Commission concludes that, as massive losses spread throughout the financial system …, many institutions failed, or would have failed but for government bailouts. As panic gripped the market, credit markets seized up, trading ground to a halt, and the stock market plunged. Lack of transparency contributed greatly to the crisis: the exposures of financial institutions to risky mortgage assets and other potential losses were unknown to market participants, and indeed many firms did not know their own exposures.

If you think about those bailouts that happened in 2008, that was a situation in which the government gave, at our expense, enormous sums of money to some of the richest people who have ever existed on Earth.

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.

As long as the big banks are allowed to remain big, their political leverage over Washington will remain big. And as long as their political leverage remains big, the taxpayer and economic tab for the next mess they create will be big.

I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.

What Obama is saying is simple: The United States has become Too Big To Fail.

I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn't deserve it.

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.

As American citizens, if you believe all banks were bailed out, you would hate banks. I would, too.

Bailouts may have been more tolerable in the early 1990s when they were rare and their use for a failing bank was uncertain. That is no longer the case.

Most of us are aware of the sacrificial slaughter of Bear Sterns. Some people call it a bailout, but I call it a handout - a government handout to some of the richest people on Earth, paid for by American taxpayers.

In truth, it's not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.'s derivatives deals - firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Barclays and UBS.

We need to think deeply about whether we can sustain banks that are not only too big to fail, but potentially too big to bail.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators.

The Bush White House sold out the birthright of the Republican Party by bailing out Wall Street.

Too big to fail is too big.

Global banking’s current structure generates an unjust distribution of risks, where losses are socialized.

I think the bailouts in 2008 were wrong.

Businesses have no place being 'too big to fail.'

You can't have some institutions that are protected by the law, not allowed to fail, and not held to account, and all the other companies in America are allowed to fail. You can't have equal justice under law and too big to fail.

I opposed the bailout of banks and car companies.

I supported some very, very objectionable things in terms of bailouts or rescues, but I did it not for Wall Street, but for the American people.

I think Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shared the view that they shouldn't be in the business of bailouts, but you know, you're not in the business of bailouts until you frankly think you need to be.