Financial Rescue Quotes

Investing in auto companies and ensuring a financial collapse didn't lead not from a recession to a great depression may not have been the most popular thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

I think the bailouts in 2008 were wrong.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

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 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.

The whole banking sector in Mexico was literally bankrupt. For whatever reason, instead of intervening in the sector or supporting the banks, the government expropriated them. We went through the very laborious period of selling the failing banks to the wealthy people of Mexico.

The Treasury's plan has little for those outside of the financial industry. It is aimed at rescuing the same financial institutions that created this crisis with the sloppy underwriting and reckless disregard for the risk they were creating, taking or passing on to others.

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.

I've never seen people as physically distraught as the Bush administration team was because of what was happening to the economy. I personally believe that the steps that President Obama took saved the economy. He doesn't get the credit he deserves for taking some very hard positions. But it was a terrible recession. So now we've dug ourselves out of it, we're standing, but we're not yet running.

In the 1970s, New York City avoided bankruptcy because wise political leaders like Gov. Hugh L. Carey believed both in strong labor unions and robust banks and companies.

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.

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 more there is a European solution to a theoretical, but possible, problem in the markets, the less we will have to talk about an I.M.F. solution.

Recapitalization has helped in many parts of the world.

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.

The Prime Minister in the UK thinks spending and borrowing more is the right thing to do in the circumstances, and is busily trying to bail out chunks of the private sector which would otherwise have to adjust more quickly to the painful reality that we have been living beyond our means.

All taxpayers feel a tremendous sense of frustration as they see many tens of billions of dollars of bonuses paid to the same mega banks that were on the brink of bankruptcy and were only saved by massive government rescue money and support. We are not satisfied by the fact that many of them have paid the money back, nor should we be.

But just as I was ready to call it quits, I got the necessary money from a third party, who had been instructed by Bing to help me out, without letting me know where the help came from.

What can you do in order to save your own banks?

I ran a 'loan modification machine.'

We should not be borrowing money from the Chinese to bail out the Greeks. What's coming next? Intergalactic bailouts?

All that can be done is to play for time to save the country from further shocks that might destroy it entirely.

We could have saved Wall Street without putting our future in jeopardy. I predicted that there would be all-around consequences - in the long run as well as in the short run. People are now saying we can't afford health care reform because we spent all the money on the banks. So, in effect, we're saying that it's better that we give rich bankers a couple of trillion than giving ordinary Americans access to health care.

In the past six months, our federal government has devised a dozen strategies to save America's financial markets. Each plan has been more costly, more risky, and less aligned with the principles of our country's free market economy than the last. I am disappointed to say that this latest plan puts all the rest of them to shame.

A lot of people are down on Bernanke, but in my view, he saved the nation.