Elizabeth Warren did a hatchet job on the banks today and threw TARP under the bus… First there was the CNBC interview. If that was not tough enough, look further down at the transcript from CNN today.
Paraphrased:
I want banks in the business they are supposed to be, lending. Not, taking government guaranteed money and trading it.
Banks take government and taxpayer money and bet it on black or red and if they win, they are rich, if they fail… we pay. Something needs to be done about that.
From CNBC this morning (she is tough – I like that):
From the CNN transcript of Wednesday’s interview:
“It held up a big sign to America and to the rest of the world that said, in effect, we are not going to let our economy collapse. Things calmed down. The markets stopped plunging. People got some confidence and so we began to stabilize. So in that sense TARP gets a real thumbs-up. Now the problem of course is that TARP was not designed solely to pump up a bunch of large financial institutions. That was supposed to be done in order to deal with other problems in the economy with foreclosures, with lack of credit to small businesses.”
“You know, we evidently got very, very good at shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars into large financial institutions, pretty much on a no-questions-asked basis. But when it came to putting money on Main Street, when it came to dealing with mortgage foreclosures and small business lending, boy, it was hard to turn loose at the nickels. And it just quite frankly just hasn’t happened in anything like the way it happened for Wall Street.”
And that is frankly we didn’t get ahead of the problem, the mortgage foreclosure problem back then and get it stopped so what it’s done is it’s ballooned. And it’s gone out into prime mortgages. It’s gone all the way across the country, and it keeps getting larger. And the government response is simply not big enough, not fast enough.”
Way to go Liz!
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Disclosure: Horowitz & Company clients may hold positions of securities mentioned as of the date published.
