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CHAPTER 1
ON GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY
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There are a lot of regulatory successes, and a lot of people are alive today because of those regulations. But there are still too many places where the world remains complicated and opaque. There are still too many places where armies of lobbyists are fighting to rig the system so that the public remains in the dark.
— Consumer Federation of America, March 2013
Putting down rules here and there can be like putting down fence posts on the prairie: They can be too easy to run around. And when the lawyers show everyone how to jog around the fence posts, the regulator responds with more rules. Pretty soon, there are so many rules that it is hard to move.
— Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, March 2011
The boogey man government is like the boogey man under the bed. It is not real. It doesn't exist. What is real and what does exist are all the specific important things we as Americans have chosen to do together through our government.
— Remarks on the Senate Floor, October 2013
If there is a lesson from the past five years, it's this: We all lose when consumers cannot readily determine whether they can afford to pay back their loans, and when lenders sell credit in ways that make it hard to see the risks and costs — in other words, when the system is in some ways fundamentally broken.
— Testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, March 2011
Government agencies work for us, not for the companies they regulate. That means agencies should not be able to cut bad deals and then hide the embarrassing details. The public deserves to know what's going on.
— Blog post, January 2014
When risk and cost aren't disclosed, and when market data and information are not made publicly available, it's bad for families, it's bad for markets, and it's bad for our country.
— Consumer Federation of America, March 2013
Markets work. Capitalism works with a set of rules. We can make the system work with regulation. I'm not somebody who believes it's time to throw the whole thing out. But regulation has got to support it. And the way it supports it, is it increases transparency in this system, it increases honesty in the system. It increases accountability in the system. When you get those things there's plenty of room to make profits. There's plenty of room to be rich, I'm all for that. But it's got to be profits that were made honestly.
— NWO Economics Series, April 2010
By the time the financial crisis hit, a different form of pricing had emerged. Lenders began to use a low advertised price on the front end to entice customers, and then made their real money with fees and charges and penalties and re-pricing in the fine print. Buyers became less and less able to evaluate the risks of a financial product, comparison shopping became almost impossible, and the market became less efficient.
— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013
I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the Trade Representative's policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant.
In other words, if people knew what was going on, they would stop it. This argument is exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.
— Blog post, June 2013
People want to see action described in terms that make sense to them and that seem fair. They want to see that taxpayer funds aren't being used to shield financial institutions from the consequences of their own actions.
— Bailout oversight committee hearing, April 2009
Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act? I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That's what oversight means. And that's certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis.
— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013
Follow this pro-corporate trend to its logical conclusion, and sooner or later you'll end up with a Supreme Court that functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of big business.
— AFL-CIO Convention, September 2013
In granting Treasury such enormous discretion with TARP money, Congress expected an equal measure of transparency and accountability. Taxpayers have a right to understand clearly what Treasury is doing, why it is doing it, what it will accomplish, and how success will be measured.
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing of Secretary Geithner, September 2009
Treasury has not explained how its financial stabilization programs fit together to address the problems that caused this crisis. This failure to connect specific programs to a clear strategy aimed at the root causes of the crisis has produced uncertainty and drained your work of public support.
— Open letter to Secretary Geithner, March 2009
When you use corporate resources to support think tanks, there are only two possible outcomes from public disclosure — those contributions do not influence the work of the think tanks or those contributions do influence the think tanks' research and conclusions. Either way, shareholders have a right to know how corporate resources are spent, and, even more importantly, policymakers and the public should be aware of your contributions and evaluate the work of the think tanks accordingly.
— Letter to Bank CEOs, December 2013
What we need is a system that puts an end to the boom and bust cycle. A system that recognizes we don't grow this country from the financial sector; we grow this country from the middle class.
— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013
Every agency is set up so that the regulators hear over and over from the industry and their lawyers and lobbyists. That means the message is the same over and over — regulate less, do less, create an exception. In building the consumer agency, it was so powerfully important to me to try to set it up structurally so that the people in the agency would hear from real families, from customers of banks. That the wind would blow sometimes from the other direction.
— A Fighting Chance
CHAPTER 2
ON THE FINANCIAL BAILOUT
* * *
When I question federal regulators in Banking Committee hearings, they insist that they don't need to take big banks to trial when they break the law. They stand by their claim that settlement agreements are tough enough.
— Blog post, January 2014
If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place ten years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.
— Harvard Law Bulletin, summer 2009
The sense of fear and uncertainty has not gone away, but it has been joined by a new sense of anger and frustration. People are angry that even if they have consistently paid their bills on time and never missed a payment, their TARP-assisted banks are unilaterally raising their interest rates or slashing their credit lines.
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing of Secretary Geithner, April 2009
Let's give students the same great deal that the banks get.
— Introducing the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act
The crash happened quickly and dramatically, and it caught our nation and apparently even our regulators by surprise. But don't let that fool you. The causes of the crisis were years in the making, and the warning signs were everywhere.
— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute speech, November 2013
People are angry that small businesses are threatened with closure because they can't get financing from their TARP-assisted banks. People are angry that when they read the headlines of record foreclosures, even if they aren't personally affected, they see their own property worth less, and they see their communities declining as a result of the foreclosures around them.
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing of Secretary Geithner, April 2009
Powerful interests will fight to hang on to every benefit and subsidy they now enjoy. Even after exploiting consumers, larding their books with excessive risk, and making bad bets that brought down the economy and forced taxpayer bailouts, the big Wall Street banks are not chastened. They have fought to delay and hamstring the implementation of financial reform, and they will continue to fight every inch of the way.
— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institutespeech, November 2013
The rules are the same. Nothing has changed. The laws have not changed. They continue to run their credit rating agencies in the way they believe will best enhance their own profits and revenues. You have to change the rules of the road.
— NWO Economics Series, April 2010
People are angry because they are paying for programs that haven't been fully explained and have no apparent benefit for their families or for the economy as a whole, but that seem to leave enough cash in the system for lavish bonuses or golf outings. None of this seems fair.
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing of Secretary Geithner, April 2009
TARP has become a pejorative four-letter word in the American lexicon. The program is better known across the country as the "Wall Street bailout." Never before has the public been forced to bear the burden of a huge financial wreckage caused by private actors.
— Testimony to the US Senate Committee on Finance, July 2010
A year ago, we were worried about banks that were too big to fail. But in the last year, big banks have gotten bigger, while 84 small banks have been allowed to fail. And some experts are estimating that 1,000 smaller and mid-size banks could disappear before this crisis is over.
I just want to know, are we more at risk on the question of concentration than we were a year ago?
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing, September 2010
Today — that's right, today — marks the fifth anniversary of President Bush signing the bank bailout into law. That financial crisis cost us upwards of $14 trillion. That's trillion with a T. That's $120,000 for every American household, more than two years worth of income for the average family. Billions of dollars in retirement savings disappeared. Millions of workers lost their jobs. And millions more families lost their homes.
— Remarks on the Senate Floor, October 2013
This agency is out here in a sense to try to hold accountable a financial-services industry that ran wild, that brought our economy to the edge of collapse. There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
— Vanity Fair, November 2011
Congress is about to write the rules of our economic system that will guide us for the next fifty years. If they get it right we're good. If they get it wrong, the country we knew will be gone. The people need to be on their representatives in Congress and the Senate. This is democracy and if we the people don't insist that those in Washington represent us then they'll go back to the same rules that benefit the large financial institutions. And frankly at that point, we're all just working for the big banks.
— NWO Economics Series, April 2010
After all, reasonable people may approve or disapprove of your plan to stop foreclosures, but no one questions that its progress should be measured against clear benchmarks for success. Yet, Treasury has provided no such benchmarks.
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing, June 2010
So the question I want to ask and that I want to press on is when you talk about the stability of the American banking system, we have 3,000 banks at serious risk that may not survive. What is Treasury doing about that? Or is the answer we are going to let them go?
— Congressional Oversight Panel hearing, June 2010
Who would have thought five years ago, after we witnessed firsthand the dangers of an overly concentrated financial system, that the Too Big to Fail problem would only have gotten worse?
— Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institutespeech, November 2013
Working families didn't ask for a bailout. They rolled up their sleeves and sent both parents into the workforce.
— The Retirement Crisis floor speech, November 2013
The financial rescue was effective in preventing a second Great Depression but could not prevent all damage from the crisis, and we are still living with those scars.
— A Fighting Chance
CHAPTER 3
ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
* * *
It is critical that the American people, and not just their financial institutions, be represented at the negotiating table.
— Harvard Law Bulletin, summer 2009
[My family] also succeeded, at least in part, because we were lucky enough to grow up in an America that invested in kids like us and helped build a future where we could flourish.
Here's the hard truth: America isn't building that kind of future any longer.
— A Fighting Chance
In every fight to build opportunity in this country, in every fight to level the playing field, in every fight for working families, we have been on the front lines because our agenda is America's agenda.
— AFL-CIO Convention, September 2013
The American middle class was forged by families who knew hardship and conflict and who dreamed of giving their children something better. It has survived wars, scandal, epidemics, the Great Depression, and massive transformations in the US economy. It is under assault, but the families that make up the middle are not quitters.
— The Two-Income Trap
For years now, we have heard the claim that America is broke, that we cannot afford to invest in our children and that we must tell our seniors to try to get by on less. We face a world in which those born in wealth will have plenty of opportunity, but those born in poverty have little chance to escape — a world in which people work their hearts out and barely hang on.
That is not the promise of American life. That was not the America of Dr. King's dreams. And that must not be our American future.
— Blog post, January 2014
And I'm appalled that so many Senators cannot admit the simple reality: we are still in the middle of a jobs crisis. People have been looking for work for months or even years. Many are starting to give up entirely. Young people are beginning to think that there isn't a future out there for them. Long-term unemployment isn't just about money; it's also about losing hope.
— Blog post, January 2014
Now, Republicans claim they believe in markets. But as anyone will tell you, a market without rules is not a market; it's the place where the most powerful come to hammer on the least powerful. Progressives understand that markets are like football, that every game needs rules, and the referee blows the whistle to enforce those rules. Without rules and a ref, it isn't football — it's a mugging. That's the big picture, and that's why I'm running for the United States Senate.
— Remarks to Netroots Nation, June 2012
Add all of this up — the dramatic decline in individual savings and the dramatic decline of guaranteed retirement benefits and employer support in return for a lifetime of work — and we're left with a retirement crisis — a crisis that is as real and as frightening as any policy problem facing the United States today.
— The Retirement Crisis floor speech, November 2013
And I'm grateful, down to my toes, for every opportunity that America gave me. This is a great country. I grew up in an America that invested in its kids and built a strong middle class; that allowed millions of children to rise from poverty and establish secure lives. An America that created Social Security and Medicare so that seniors could live with dignity; an America in which each generation built something solid so that the next generation could build something better.
— Democratic National Convention, September 2012
In our democracy, government is not some make believe thing that has an independent will of its own. In our democracy, government is just how we describe all of the things that "we the people" have already decided to do together.
— Remarks on the Senate Floor, October 2013
Every year during the Marathon, we are one family. We cheer for each other, and we carry each other across finish lines. When tragedy strikes, we are also one family. We hurt together, and we help together.
— In reference to the Boston Marathon Bombing
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Quotable Elizabeth Warren"
by .
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