Regulatory Influence Quotes

You cannot move a piece of [energy] legislation through Congress in the year 2013 unless the American Petroleum Institute proposes it. You cannot move legislation without their consent. They are a de facto fourth branch of government.

Whenever government proposes to get involved in the regulation of trade, just be very, very careful about who's behind this proposal, what their motives are.

Sooner or later, the regulated industry tries to get control of the regulating body.

In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures.

It's being reported that Google spent over $5 million on lobbying just during the first quarter of this year. You'd think Google wouldn't really need to lobby politicians. All they have to say is, 'We have your search history. Do what we tell you.'

Newt Gingrich said that this executive producer is weird and it raises - does raise questions about possible conflicts. The FCC regulates NBC corporations can try to curry favor with the president by placing their products on the show [Celebrity Apprentice].

We think there is a parallel between federal involvement in education and the decline in profit over recent years.

Large multinational corporations, often acting through their industry lobbies, exert a powerful influence on the formulation of domestic rules and on their application - but their influence on supranational institutional design is even larger because it faces practically no opposition there.

corporate America corrupted the watchdogs that were supposed to be guarding the public interest by feeding them under the table.

It was while starting my business that I saw my first glimpse of government's impact on business.

The increasing supply of lobbyists should have driven the price of lobbying down, not up. … The most credible explanation … is that clients grew more and more confident that their lobbyists could deliver something of value in exchange for their fees. … The reason companies started buying, in other words, was that Congress began selling.

I think what I brought from the private sector was a real appreciation of how much leverage - respect, if you will - that the SEC has. Major companies, in particular, really don't want to be at war with their primary regulator. The SEC may not have appreciated just how great our leverage is.

Real estate deals a lot with the government. It isn't like manufacturing, logistics, home appliances or the auto sector, which deal with consumers.

I think one could argue that there's more political input into the regulatory side, and on the regulatory side there seem to be fewer people with financial and banking experience - there are more lawyers, academics, economists, maybe politicians now.