Bailout Quotes & Sayings

A federal bailout would spare California from having to make spending cuts needed to bring its budget into balance. The matter has become urgent since California voters rejected several tax-hiking ballot initiatives. Rather than taking the vote as a signal to dramatically curtail spending, the state turned to the feds. If they get a free pass, the politicians can avoid fixing any of their past mistakes or preparing California for the future. — Peter Schiff

We never intend to lose our jobs, break up with our live-in loves, or face any number of the curveballs life throws our way. But they happen all the same, so have a bailout plan just in case. Sounds corny, but I call this the 'freedom fund' because it gives you the freedom to get out of a jam without climbing into debt. — Alexa Von Tobel

The Tea Party grew out of indignation over the Wall Street bailout - an indignation shared by the vast majority of Americans. But the Tea Party ended up directing its ire at government rather than at big business and Wall Street. — Robert Reich

...small government gives you big freedoms--and Big Government leaves you with very little freedom. The opposite of Big Government is not small government, but Big Liberty. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher--and you make it very difficult ever to change back. — Mark Steyn

One third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Wall Street buyers of repackaged loans didn't mind buying risky paper because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout from the taxpayers. Today's housing mess can be laid directly at the feet of Congress and the White House. — Walter E. Williams

I didn't know you were Catholic. (to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as he got down on one knee to beg Pelosi to find Democratic support for the bailout bill)-2008 — Nancy Pelosi

Punishing enemies and rewarding friends - politics Chicago style - seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and IRS's gift tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors. They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government. One thing they don't look like is the rule of law. — Michael Barone

Barack Obama likes to point to General Motors as the poster child for the job creation success of his economic policies. However, whatever your sentiments about the government's bailout of General Motors, for every job Barack Obama 'saved-or-created' in the U.S. there were two jobs off shore. — Bob Beauprez

I got all the respect in the world for the front-runners in this race, but ask yourself: If we replace a Democratic insider with a Republican insider, you think we're really going to change Washington, D.C.? You don't have to settle for Washington and Wall Street insiders who supported the Wall Street bailout and the Obamacare individual mandate. — Rick Perry

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer. — Charles Duhigg

If your bank took bailout money, take your money out of that bank and put it in a credit union. Credit unions are owned by the people who have their money in the credit union. — Michael Moore

In truth, it's not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.'s derivatives deals - firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Barclays and UBS. — Tyler Cowen

The government cannot become a bailout organization for companies on the verge of bankruptcy. — Martin Winterkorn

This strategy, which was then used as the template for the rest of the European periphery, turning the majority of European states into what I jokingly refer to as Bailoutistan, was always going to backfire on the European economy. Tim Geithner and Jack Lew, his successor in the US Treasury Department, understood this well. They shared the concern that what started in Greece in 2010, with the combination of an absurd bailout and a hideous level of austerity, has put Europe into a position that undermines America's recovery and threatens the prospects of China, Latin America, even India and Africa. — Yanis Varoufakis

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. — Timothy Noah

I find it extraordinary that I'm being told I can't trust you the voter to get a government in to protect workers rights and that we need Brussels to defend you, the euro is a broken project we are going to pay, no you are going to pay out of your taxes one bailout out of another and the European union does not protect your jobs. — Gisela Stuart

The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown. — Nouriel Roubini

Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. And so when someone says, 'We don't have enough money for this space probe.' No, it's not that you don't have enough money. It's that the distribution of money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Any bailout of a private company is a bad decision by our federal government. Private companies have the right to succeed, but they also should have the right to fail. — Matt Salmon

I dont know of one group of people thats more disliked than politicians
it may be the folks who gave us the Wall Street bailout. And thats where Mitt Romney comes from. — Rick Santorum

The bailout of Fannie Mae is completely off the books. It's going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet nobody is placing this in any type of column in accounting for federal debt. — Leonard Lance

Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a 'moral hazard,' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again. — Eliot Spitzer

In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors - or somebody else's friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. — Sebastian Junger

Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products - known as "Mr. Credit-Default Swap" - led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees - including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment. Neither — Sebastian Junger

Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos. — Thomas Sowell

Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions. — Robert Reich

Four hundred obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks - most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008 - now have more cash, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. — Michael Moore

In 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, we anticipated that Europe was going to have a very different bailout scheme than the U.S. because of their different political systems and different relationships between the central banks and the fiscal authorities. — Lou Jiwei

Governor Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit. — Rick Santorum

If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail, we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout. — Robert Kiyosaki

I opposed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement. I opposed the Wall Street bailout. I opposed the stimulus bill. — Mike Pence

State constitutions typically provide that the state first has to service its debt, then make it pension payments, and then pay for services. What we don't know is whether that order will be enforced. And ultimately, the busted state is going to be looking to the federal government for a bailout. Think Greece, but on a much bigger scale. — Eugene Fama

My mother always taught me that two wrongs don't make a right. We shouldn't bail out Wall Street. We shouldn't bail out Detroit. It will cost the economy more than the cost of the bailout which is more than the politicians think. We'll run into the hundred of millions to prop these companies up. — Peter Schiff

On domestic policy, Donald Trump agreed with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Wall Street bailout, the TARP bailout of big bank. I think the government ought to be standing with mainstream, with working men and women. And then you put on top of that the ethical issues, whether it is refusing to release his taxes. And that's a real problem. — Ted Cruz

A contingent bailout policy - implicit or explicit - must be coupled with some regulation of what banks can and cannot do. For example, a ban on lending to uncreditworthy customers might well make sense. — Eric Maskin

Remember the Tea Party movement didn't get started in September of 2008 when the bank bailout was passed. It really began on Feb. 19th, 2009 when a television commentator named Rick Santelli stood up and said what the hell are we doing bailing out people who couldn't afford a mortgage by taking money from people like me who are prudent? — Karl Rove

While it would have been straightforward, and perfectly legal, to allow Irish banks or the Greek state to default to their private creditors (so as to respect the no-bailout clause), the authorities' guilty desire to bail out the German and French banks (without telling taxpayers that this was what they were doing) led to the need to violate the no-bailout rule by concocting another rule: the no-default rule, which was never part of Europe's original set of rules. (...) Both the freshly minted no-default rule and the original no-bailout clause were political whims of the strong disguised as legal constraints upon the weak. In reality, the strong break their rules at will and concoct new rules whenever they think it suits them. — Yanis Varoufakis

California is going to take themselves off the cliff culturally and economically, fiscally. They are going to be at the trough in Washington wanting a bailout. — Jim DeMint

The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will. Washington still hasn't learned this. American hubris can lead the administration and Congress into a bailout solution that the rest of the world, which has to finance it, might not accept. — Paul Craig Roberts

I watch too much cable, I admit. Day after day it gets frustrating. Yesterday I watched as someone called legislation to prevent teacher layoffs a bailout - but I know that's not a view held by many, nor were the views I was frustrated about. — Robert Gibbs

After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country. — Michele Bachmann

This is part of the reason that the AIG bailout is so troubling: when at least $13 billion worth of taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, some of that money was doubtless going to cover the bets Goldman had made against the stuff the bank itself was selling to old people and cities and states. In other words, Goldman made out on the housing bubble twice: it fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets. — Matt Taibbi

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. — Thomas Friedman

Your story is for - voting for every disastrous trade agreement, and voting for corporate America. Did I vote against the Wall Street bailout? — Bernie Sanders

I opposed No Child Left Behind, I opposed the Medicare prescription drug bill, I opposed the Wall Street bailout. What the American people are starting to see is that Republican, Republicans on Capitol Hill get it and the Democrats, from the White House to Capitol Hill, just don't get it. — Mike Pence

Government-imposed loan standards precipitated a banking crisis, which was solved by a government bailout and control of the banks. As a result, little by little, fewer and fewer are making more and more banking decisions. Government — David Jeremiah

The ESM, the European Stability Mechanism, is not funded by Germany alone. Twenty-seven percent of the bailout package comes from Germany. Italy and France together cover a total of 38 percent. That's reality. It makes no sense to say that everyone wants to get at Germany's money. — Martin Schulz

Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich supported the Wall Street bailout. — Michele Bachmann

If the election had turned out differently, I could be the one overseeing the signing of bailout checks and Vice President Biden could be on the road selling his book 'Going Rogaine.' — Sarah Palin

I have trouble understanding why taking a few grand a year in food stamps is somehow magically different than taking trillions as a bailout. Food stamps cost $76.4 billion for 2013, compared with trillions, possibly hundreds of those, for the banks. — Linda Tirado

Most of us are aware of the sacrificial slaughter of Bear Sterns. Some people call it a bailout, but I call it a handout - a government handout to some of the richest people on Earth, paid for by American taxpayers. — Robert Kiyosaki

I do know that all of the Michigan delegation worked very hard as related to the revival of the auto industry. There was really a choice between bankruptcy and liquidation. There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars. There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government. [The auto bailout was] bipartisan from the get-go. [Without it,] Michigan would have hit 40 percent unemployment rates. — Fred Upton

Some taxpayers may object to a print journalism bailout on the grounds that it mostly benefits the liberal elite. And we can't blame taxpayers for being reluctant to subsidize the reportorial careers of J-school twerps who should have joined the Peace Corps and gone to Africa to 'speak truth to power' to Robert Mugabe. — P. J. O'Rourke

The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing. — Andrew Ross Sorkin