there s a lot of history. when you walk down the halls and you see the portraits of all of these people, you realize thef d you realize that the treasury has such an important function. many of which is nonpolitical. many of inch is operating the u.s. government and focusing on the economy and the growth and opportunities. and i m honored to follow a great tradition not of only goldman sachs people. i work very closely with secretary paulson. it was an honor to follow him. but a number of incredible individuals that served in this role. i ve been a regional banker for the last nine years. i think that experience and being a regional banker and having met with hundreds and hundreds of businesses, small, medium-size businesses and understanding what they need to drive their business in this
went out, when general electric was worried about paying employees. take us to the darkest day. what was the toughest and required the most courage to act? well, the toughest times clearly the weekend and week that followed and lehman failed early monday morning, then aig, the world s largest insurance company came close to failing, the fed and treasury intervened to prevent it from failing. we it to explain that to the president and then explain it to congress. what we told congress, secretary paulson and i was that if this company failed, that our financial system was already almost in cardiac arrest, would collapse entirely and bring down our economy. and we explained this to the congressman and told them what we were going to do and they basically told us, well, thanks for telling us about this, but this is your decision, your responsibility, congress is not going to support you on this. and so we were stuck in the middle in that very, very tough decision. are you surprised we
strong consumer protection bureau so they can t cheat people on mortgages, credit cards, on checking accounts. we need a good strong consumer agency. the other thing i want them to do, i want them so they can t wreck the american economy. too big to fail. remember in 2008 how we were all told when secretary paulson stepped out and said in effect these guys are just too big and i know you don t like the bailout but we are going to have to spend billions to bail them out because if we don t they will bring down the entire economy. they are a third bigger now than they were then. last july august the fdic and the federal reserve bank said 11 of the largest financial institutions in this country are so big that if they started to stumble that either the american taxpayer would have to bail them out, or they would bring down
only one prohibition mostly pro-market, doesn t tell the financial community they can t do this or that. we do try to say if you take risks you should be responsible if they go bad. but we banned the bad mortgages. i very much admire senator warren but she s wrong if she thinks that. here s what the law said, this is bipartisan as this whole thing should have been. secretary paulson suggested the basic approach. some large institutions too big to fail out taking account of the consequences so have the power in federal officials to step in, put those institutions out of business. as i said i have one disagreement with sarah palin. she was right we enacted death penalties for big bank, not old ladies and the bank is abolished. some of the debts may have to be paid to prevent there from being contagion but any penny advanced by law has to be recover eed by the secretary of the treasury from the largest institutions in
packaged them and sold them to people who didn t know what what was in them. only one prohibition mostly pro-market, doesn t tell the financial community they can t do this or that. we do try to say if you take risks you should be responsible if they go bad. but we banned the bad mortgages. i very much admire senator warren but she s wrong if she thinks that. here s what the law said, this is bipartisan as this whole thing should have been. secretary paulson suggested the basic approach. some large institutions too big to fail out taking account of the consequences so have the power in federal officials to step in, put those institutions out of business. as i said i have one disagreement with sarah palin. she was right we enacted death penalties for big bank, not old ladies and the bank is abolished. some of the debts may have to be paid to prevent there from being contagion but any penny advanced by law has to be recover eed by