Quotes About Regulation

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.

Someone out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at different times at different exchanges to front-run orders from one market to another.

The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.

The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.

If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least." Eisman

market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawning innovations. The traits required of this corporation were that it not be a bank—and thus subject to bank regulation, and the need to reserve capital against risky assets—and that it be willing and able to bury exotic risks on its

His experience with Household Finance had disabused him of any hope that the government would intercede to prevent rich corporations from doing bad things to poor people.

But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit, that's just fucking crazy. That's fraud. Maybe you can't prove it in a court of law. But it's fraud." It

The problem wasn't that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed.

He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.

If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least.

The more egregious the rating agencies' mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In

The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don't make loans to people who can't repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don't keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income departments of big Wall Street investment banks

It took us weeks to really grasp it because it was so weird," said Charlie. "But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit, that's just fucking crazy. That's fraud. Maybe you can't prove it in a court of law. But it's fraud." It

We always asked the same question," says Eisman. "'Where are the ratings agencies in all this?' And I'd always get the same reaction. It was a physical reaction because they didn't want to say it. It was a smirk.

He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

For example, if you want to know the likelihood that the geese loitering near the LaGuardia Airport runway will cause your plane to crash-land in the Hudson River and the event will become the subject of a major motion picture, you go to see the undersecretary or deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, which oversees the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles the bewildering set of conflicts in America between people and animals.

Cheese pizzas are the FDA's problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the USDA.

Charles Kindleberger's 1978 classic, Manias, Panics, and Crashes.

The regulation side of things is, as a rule, less vulnerable to the short-term idiocy of a new administration than the money side of things.

Really, it's brilliant what they have done within the bounds of the regulation. They are much less of a villain than I thought. The system has let down the investor.

An American killed by his spinach can justifiably blame the FDA, but an American killed by his steak is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. Cheese pizzas are the FDA's problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the USDA.

She said working for the government, you need to imagine you are tied down, Gulliver-style. And if you want to even wiggle your big toe, first you need to ask permission. And that if you can imagine that and still imagine getting things done, you'll get things done.

The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, statistics that detailed access to drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico were deleted from the FEMA website.