Quote

It is no wonder that bank capital is regulated. When borrowing and lending is profitable, it is tempting for banks to scale up their operations and to borrow and lend too much in relation to their capital, in effect reducing the effectiveness of the potential capital cushion.

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.

It's extremely important for our banks to have more capital, higher quality capital.

Before the arrival of the Credit Union, people who were from the poor background or a working class background couldn't borrow from banks.

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

There is no evidence that more regulation makes things better. The most highly regulated industry in America is commercial banking, and that didn't save those institutions from making terrible decisions.

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.

Anytime we wanted to do something, we found a way to do it through conventional banking means.

The financial system has to be regulated, we have to end with the tax havens, and it's necessary that the central banks in the world should control a little bit the banks' financing because they cannot bypass a certain range of leverage.

Banks were once places to hold money and were very careful in lending to finance families as they built a future - bought homes, bought cars, took out student loans.