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The Great Recession rocked the foundation of every financial institution, including Johnson Bank. We were struggling, and it was happening under my watch.

Let's be honest: It wasn't just the banks who messed up. There were a lot of people who tried to buy assets they couldn't afford. That's a reality.

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

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 saw the government really using the excuse of a weak economy and a financial crisis to create more government and to push onto the American entrepreneurial society more and more restraints and government activity.

There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

Governments of all stripes want to deliver growth and rebalance their economies now that they have learned the hard way that, left to their own devices, markets pick expensive banking losers.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.