Regulatory Failure Quotes

Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.

The constant need for special waivers is symptomatic of poorly written public policy. It's a signal that the cost of compliance is unreasonably high; the benefits are hard to measure; and either legislators or regulators have failed to do their homework.

The collapse of Enron and the subsequent collapse of Arthur Andersen were tremendous tragedies. But as I stated at the time of my indictment on July 8, 2004, failure does not equate to a crime.

I want to say something, and it may sound harsh, not to you, but to the American people. In a sense, in my view, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. It's fraud. I believe that corruption is rampant, and the fact that major bank after major bank has reached multi billion dollar settlements with the United States government when we have a weak regulator system tells me that not only did we have to bail them out once, if we don't start breaking them up, we're going to have to bail them out again, and I do not want to see that happen.

In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.

Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.

OSHA can’t and won’t do its job…. the current OSHA injury and illness information is inaccurate in part due to wide-scale underreporting by employers and OSHA’s willingness to accept these falsified numbers

I think that the S.E.C. has been pretty feckless when it comes to reigning in reckless behavior on Wall Street.

They not only deregulated. They desupervised.

Anyplace market forces have been artificially removed by the government there is a total absence of incentives, competition, effective oversight, cost controls and so on.

Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.

If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.

I am not in the business of pointing fingers or making excuses. However, recent history has shown that I, like thousands of others in Ireland, incorrectly relied upon the persons who guided Anglo and who wrongfully sought to portray a 'blue chip' Irish banking sector.

Americans who want a healthy and clean environment expect lawful, effective, and economically sound regulation - the Clean Power Plan failed on all three counts.

In England the attempts which our fore-fathers made for Regulating of Manufactures, when left to the Execution of some particular person, in a short time resolved but into a Tax upon the Commodity, without respect to the goodness thereof … a Seal was invented, as a signal that the Commodity was made according to the Statutes, which Seals it is said, may now be bought by Thousands, and put upon what the Buyers please.

Two-thirds of the directors at the New York Fed are hand-picked by the same bankers that the Fed is in charge of regulating.

The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.

Giving people like Dodd and Frank more authority is like rewarding an arsonist with gasoline and matches.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality - what a joke. In my district, we caught them lying to us about the results of air quality studies in the Barnett Shale. They are playing with the health and safety of our communities, and we are going to tell them that is not acceptable.

Opacity on extreme levels is not addressed anywhere, including Dodd-Frank.

Year after year we do not get reform as a result of scandals; we simply get more scandals.

Because of the failure of the federal government to enforce federal law, we now have 'banks too big to fail,' unregulated Internet monopoly, and the evisceration of a dispersed and independent media.

Too few people in my old field of financial services were ever brought to book for their part in the 2008 crash.