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I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

The reason why I'm a conservative is because conservative policies work and they improve opportunities. They are the avenue for climbing the economic dream.

I'm all in favor of banks that play their part in community endeavors, private individuals looking for loans, people who want to start up a little business, and that's what banks are for.

We don't think of ourselves as a regional investment bank. We think of ourselves as merchant bankers with clients all over the country.

One of the risks for anybody in the lending business is that being conservative can harm your competitiveness.

The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

I mean, I'm a conservative. I believe that, you know, if you borrow too much, you just build up debts for your children to pay off. You put pressure on interest rates. You put at risk your economy. That's the case in Britain. We're not a reserve currency, so we need to get on and deal with this issue.

The real problem at the moment is that the banks - because of their existing culture, which is frankly anti-business, obsession with short-term trading profits, not focusing on the long term - are throttling the recovery of British industry.

On private transactions, I'll just go very quickly now, a major difference between the United States and Euroland is that in Europe banks are much more important in financial transactions than in the United States.

In the U.A.E. we were the least-regulated environment in the region, and over time we are seeing more and more regulation coming in. On the other hand, a central bank can overregulate and choke the economy, and then we will have a dead banking industry.