Henry Paulson Quotes

Limiting the destructive risk-taking by large financial firms and banks which are 'too big to fail' is needed.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.

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.

The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.

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

One of the big problems we had during the financial crisis was the intermingling of banks and holding companies and complex securities.

Make the financial industry pay for its mistakes. That's the idea behind the best of the Obama administration's reform proposals: If banks issue securities backed by mortgages, say, then require them to hold some of that paper so that they will bear some of the losses.

We must learn the lessons of the 2008 crash: no company should be able to become too big to fail.

For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

If a bank's too big so that it can't fail without hurting our economy, well then, it's too big.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

Unregulated derivatives like credit default swaps threaten our regulated markets, or indeed our economy without any Federal agency knowing about it.

We must limit the perception that some institutions are either too big or too interconnected to fail.

I think Dodd-Frank has contributed to a concentration of banking assets in the hands of a small number of banks.

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can't get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.

Bringing back something akin to Glass-Steagall would clearly help limit risk in the system. And that's a very good and worthy goal. Letting banks sell securities and insurance products and services allowed them to grow too big too fast and fueled a culture that put profit and pay over prudence.

No single housing finance institution should be too big to fail.

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

The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.