Quotes & Sayings About Regulators

Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die. — John Stossel

There are no absolutes in this world, and there will always be mistakes that are made within brokerage firms; there will always be people who set out to deceive the regulators and even deceive their own senior management. — Mary Schapiro

In a world of businessmen and financial intermediaries who aggressively seek profit, innovators will always outpace regulators; the authorities cannot prevent changes in the structure of portfolios from occurring. What they can do is keep the asset-equity ratio of banks within bounds by setting equity-absorption ratios for various types of assets. If the authorities constrain banks and are aware of the activities of fringe banks and other financial institutions, they are in a better position to attenuate the disruptive expansionary tendencies of our economy. — Hyman Minsky

Every day Big Government heaps demands and restrictions upon businesses that sink some enterprises, cause others to direct resources away from serving customers and instead toward jumping through hoops of lawyers and regulators, and prevent other operations from ever getting off the ground. — Joel Miller

As I gather my thoughts here in order to get to the point, I am reminded of a joke Zafar made when he was still in banking. I say joke, but Zafar was always rather serious about banking and often talked about accountability, as he called it. This stuff is so esoteric, he once said, that the only people who understand it are in the business. What about regulators? I asked. Regulators, he replied, have one eye on the revolving door. Academics make money teaching traders their latest research, and politicians don't know their arses from their elbows. Can you imagine the people on a march against finance? The guy on a megaphone shouting: What do we want? And everyone answering: Specific curbs on short selling in certain circumstances. When do we want it? In phases and at appropriate times. That's the joke. It was funny at the time. — Zia Haider Rahman

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike. — George Soros

Every regulatory speech on derivatives takes a bow to their hedging 'benefits.' Less publicly, regulators pay their respects to derivative profits, a blessed relief from the banks' troubled loans to less-developed countries, highly leveraged companies, and real estate swingers. — Carol Loomis

Most companies aim to get bigger. But beyond a certain point, bigness becomes synonymous with badness. Think of Big Pharma, Big Auto, Big Oil. Worse, if you are regularly described as one of the Big Four, Five, or Six in any business sector, you are probably already in the sights of regulators and lawmakers. — Andrew Hill

It's almost sickening now that the regulators 'on the beat' while the biggest credit collapse in modern financial history unfolded are now patting themselves on the back for their 'brave' stance on short-selling! — James Chanos

You can't overestimate what happens when you encourage regulators to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate. — Joseph Stiglitz

It's hardly a radical idea to suggest that regulators and legislators understand the law now, is it? — Nigel Farage

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems. — Eric Alterman

For it is the very commodities selected for maximum price-fixing that the regulators most want to keep in abundant supply. But when they limit the wages and the profits of those who make these commodities, without also limiting the wages and profits of those who make luxuries or semiluxuries, they discourage the production of the price-controlled necessities while they relatively stimulate the production of less essential goods. — Henry Hazlitt

A lot of the other companies in the space have really left a bad taste in regulators' mouths. It's actually been a huge advantage when we come in and we take the time to sit down and get to know them, explain the business, explain what we do. — Logan Green

Regulation has gone astray ... Either because they have become captives of regulated industries or captains of outmoded administrative agencies, regulators all too often encourage or approve unreasonably high prices, inadequate service, and anticompetitive behavior. The cost of this regulation is always passed on to the consumer. And that cost is astronomical. — Edward Kennedy

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something. — Alan Greenspan

Regulators are in the best position to regulate when they are intimately knowledgeable about the activities they are regulating. — John Thain

In China, going public has a cachet from a branding standpoint. It will improve our image to ad agencies, government regulators. — Victor Koo

The "old school" of wastewater treatment, still embraced by most government regulators and many academics, considers water to be a vehicle for the routine transfer of waste from on place to another. It also considers the accompanying organic material to be of little or no value. The "new school", on the other hand, sees water as a dwindling, precious resource that should not be polluted with waste; organic materials are seen as resources that should be constructively recycled. My research for this chapter included reviewing hundreds of research papers on alternative wastewater systems. I was amazed at the incredible amount of time and money that has gone into studying how to clean the water we have polluted with human excrement. In all of the research papers, without exception, the idea that we should simply stop defecating in water was never suggested. — Joseph Jenkins

Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so ... — Alan Greenspan

Nobody wants to be against technology, but I think that regulators should not - and people should not - assume that faster is always better in markets. — Bart Chilton

It strikes me as hubris that Universal will buy EMI. What it will do is create a super-major that will have far too much power ... I think when Universal goes up over 40 percent market share, I don't see how reasonable regulators can countenance. It will impact not just labels, but artists and cultural diversity. — Edgar Bronfman Jr.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less. — Michael Lewis

The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that's really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do. — Robert Pozen

Perhaps more to the point for TBTF (Too Big To Fail bank), if a SIFI (Systemically Important Financial Institution) does fail I have little doubt that private investors will in fact bear the losses-even if this leads to an outcome that is messier and more costly to society than we would ideally like. Dodd-Frank is very clear in saying that the Federal Reserve and other regulators cannot use their emergency authorities to bail out an individual failing institution — Jeremy C. Stein

The question is not whether we should or should not regulate; it
is how much should we regulate and who the regulators should
be. We went overboard on deregulation under Reagan. Under
Bush, many people lost in the casino. Now we have the Obama
administration overreacting and overreaching with regulation that
does the exact opposite of wealth creation. If we are to have change
we can believe in, then we could start by replacing the majority
of the lawyers in regulatory agencies with actual experienced, successful
business veterans. They would have recognized the early warning
signs of many of the financial debacles created by the bubble-bust
cycle. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Freedom is the quality of being free from the control of regulators and tax collectors. If I want to be free their control, I must not impose controls on others. — Hans F. Sennholz

However ... ," Satan said.
Bick sighed. "However, I didn't count on the growing interference of lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats and politicians into my business. I swear it seems that every year they stick their noses into more and more."
Lucifer chuckled. "Sorry about that-I outdid myself there. — R.S. Belcher

I've spent enough time in the business community to know there are certain regulators who are very constructive in their approach - those who enforce the laws and who actually want to help you comply - and there are others who have a prosecutorial attitude. — Chris Gabrieli

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators. — Gary Weiss

The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes-governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions-all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization. — George Gilder

You read constantly that banks are lobbying regulators and elected officials as if this is inappropriate. We don't look at it that way. — Jamie Dimon

They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.
They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.
For the very first time I realize, that this, too, maight also be a lie. — Lauren Oliver

No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time. — Lauren Oliver

These elements are important for several reasons. First, offers in service negotiations may require the binding of existing regulatory situations, and countries should avoid scheduling legally binding measures that domestic regulators do not find adequate or fully developed. — Sebastian Saez

We smoked fat cigars by the campfire and they tasted like wood and ash. The inhale and exhale was exciting. Blowing smoke rings in the calm forest air was followed by a deep swallow of cheap beer, and this too was exciting. There was no judgment in the wild, and so indulgences were plentiful. There were no regulators here and we were free to indulge in the deep intoxications that made our minds free. — Daniel J. Rice

So when you see a regulation against lead, because lead is a bad in a regulators mind, what does that mean? You are not telling us what is good, you are just tell us what you don't want, not what you do want. — William McDonough

Government barriers on Business For example, the Endangered Species Act prevents 'disturbing the habitat' of the spotted owl. That has restricted 4.2 million acres of forest from development, leading to the loss of 30,000 lumber-related jobs and the annual loss of 1.1 billion board feet of lumber. This has driven up the cost of houses by at least $4,000 each. In addition, regulators ordered a Kansas City bank to install a Braille keypad on its drive-through automatic teller machine, presumably to aid any blind drivers. The list goes on and on. — Rush Limbaugh

TV broadcasting is owned, in the sense that governments around the world have asserted power over the airwaves that permeate their territories, deciding who can use what bandwidth and why - and those with licenses then, with exceptions determined by regulators, decide what to broadcast. — Jonathan Zittrain

I urge telecommunications regulators to develop a commercial strategy for delivering effective access to the continent. — Mark Shuttleworth

Markets are imperfect. So you do need regulation, knowing that the regulators are also human. — George Soros

Regulators are power-lusting mediocrities. — Yaron Brook

Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant. — H.L. Mencken

Wall Street banks have the right to express their views to lawmakers and regulators through lobbying, but the law is clear: If they want to influence lawmakers, they must disclose their lobbying expenditures. — Elizabeth Warren

I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market. — John Stossel

Our party [Republicans] has been focused on big business too long. I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business. That's why everything I'll do is designed to help small businesses grow and add jobs. I want to keep their taxes down on small business. I want regulators to see their job as encouraging small enterprise, not crushing it. — Mitt Romney

If the Congress is going to spend its whole time hauling up regulators and bureaucrats and looking like they're focusing on tiny, trivial things, instead of jobs and the economy, it could be a problem for them. — Mara Liasson

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a major problem from poorly tested products and it should be dealt with sooner rather than later by government regulators. — Steven Magee

Apparently modern financial regulators are vastly more sophisticated than we were as financial regulators 25 years ago - because we had never figured out that the key to financial stability was leaving felons in charge of the largest financial institutions in the world. — William K. Black

It is vital for officials and regulators to have input from people within our businesses who understand the intricacies of how financial markets operate and the consequences of certain policy decisions. — Jamie Dimon

My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks. — Spencer Bachus

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became — Bill Bryson

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category. — Robert F. Engle

Andrew used to say you have to embrace the fight, walk toward the fire. He would explain that you are going to get hit with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune no matter which way you turn. You can try to hide from the attacks of the left; you can run away from them, attempt to ignore them, pretend that the left has reached some sort of quasi-consensus in which they live and let live. That will last until the protesters are outside your business, the government regulators are outside your house, or the administrators are inside your child's classroom. Then you'll realize that while you were willing to let live, the left simply wasn't. — Ben Shapiro

Harrington never worked in a place like this, a system where 'underbudgeting' is designed to arbitrarily keep costs down while acting as a defense against public attack. The city and state thus appear magnanimous, politicians fair-minded regulators of the public good . . . until the closed cases lead to starvation, child abuse and suicides at rates so great they arouse the public's conscience. Then it all starts again - bigger budgets, closer supervision, more MSW programs . . . while the poor are blamed because according to our Puritan tradition of self-reliance those too weak or stupid to contribute get pushed aside, deserve not to survive — Philip Schultz

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators. — Gary Weiss

The American Medical Association not only represents the roughly 800,000 practicing physicians in the United States, but also sets the official standards for treatment for virtually every patient malady, and is instrumental in directing and controlling the supply of doctors entering medical school. By virtue of an affiliated licensing body called the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the AMA determines which medical schools receive its official accreditation, and for over a hundred years it has been very stingy with its approval process. Furthermore, the AMA together with its close affiliate, the American Association of Medical Colleges, conducts regular studies to assess the necessary supply of medical doctors and advises existing medical schools as well as state and federal regulators as to optimal admission levels for new students - and these too have been artificially and unnecessarily constricted[22]. — Reid Jenner

Regulators in Britain, America and Switzerland fined six banks - HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup - a total of $4.3 billion for manipulating foreign exchange markets. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said that traders at the banks had colluded to rig important benchmark exchange rates between 2008 and 2013. — Anonymous

You don't make a system more effective by increasing the number of regulators. — Heather Brooke

Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. — Neal Stephenson

Most businesses believe regulators intend to fine them rather than help them protect their workers. Serious violations should bring real consequences, but minor violations should only incur warnings that encourage compliance. — James Lankford

Under the constitution, there was never meant to be a federal police force. Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century. Yet today, fueled by the federal government's misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the States where they have no legal authority. The sacrifice of individual responsibility and the concept of local government by the majority of American citizens has permitted the army of bureaucrats to thrive. — Ron Paul

Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

Research finally established the dominant role of fatty acids in supplying energy for the body, and the fundamental role of insulin and adipose tissue as the regulators of energy supply. — Gary Taubes

What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the "quiet enjoyment" of one's private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property "owner" faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and "go to auction" at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as "fascism." — Vin Suprynowicz

According to an article in the Washington Post: The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly urged antidepressant manufacturers not to disclose to physicians and the public that some clinical trials of the medications in children found that drugs were no better than sugar pills, according to documents and testimony released at a congressional hearing yesterday. Regulators supressed the negative information on the grounds that it might scare families and physicians away from the drugs, according to testimony by drug company executives. For at least three medications, they said, the FDA blocked the companies' plans to reveal the negative studies in drug labels. — Irving Kirsch

Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians. — Seth Klarman

Every deal is a regulated deal. Regulators will tell you how to take your money home. — David Bonderman

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months. — Charles Duhigg

Instruct regulators to look for the newest fad in the industry and examine it with great care. The next mistake will be a new way to make a loan that will not be repaid. — L. William Seidman

By common consent of the nations, gold and silver are the only true measure of value. They are the necessary regulators of trade. I have myself no more doubt that these metals were prepared by the Almighty for this very purpose, than I have that iron and coal were prepared for the purposes in which they are being used. — Hugh McCulloch

The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government. — Jerry Brown

I think an ethical lawyer would absolutely refuse, if he or she had knowledge that this is the purpose for which her work would be used, that is, to conceal a fraudulent scheme from federal regulators. — Viet D. Dinh

No one doing big business can avoid some contact with government agencies, regulators, and policy makers. — Mikhail Prokhorov

The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy. — Joel Bakan

There are a number of institutions globally where the Federal Reserve typically leads the U.S. effort to work with financial regulators from other countries, and we try to, to the extent possible, establish international standards for how - the amount of capital a bank should hold, for example, or how much. — Ben Bernanke

I don't know about you, but I'm betting that when it comes to doing the right and good thing, the Little Sisters of the Poor know better than the regulators at the Department of Health and Human Services. — Jeb Bush

The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators. — John Lanchester

Regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don't see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out. — Elizabeth Warren

We are totally open kimono with regulators. — Jamie Dimon

The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product. — Ralph Nader

There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don't even get a reward. — Ashlee Vance

[C]ritics of Canadian securities regulators sometimes point out that a number of high-profile US securities cases have resulted in prison sentences for the offenders, while incarceration for Canadian securities law violators seems very rare...[A]s has often been noted, incarceration is far more frequent in the United States for crimes of all kinds, yet it is not usually suggested that this is proof that the United States is generally a safer place to live than Canada. — Paul Halpern

Every time Washington regulators pass down another heavy-handed rule or levy another hefty fine, Colorado loses potential jobs, revenue, and economic security. — Bob Beauprez

History is on the side of the regulators. — Ha-Joon Chang

[The government involvement in the economy] is so overwhelming and beyond anything we have ever seen, that we risk moving this country away from a government of the people to a government of the regulators. — Tom J. Donohue

It's a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation. — Henry Paulson

This is the joint responsibility of everyone who was involved in the introduction of the euro without understanding the consequences. When the euro was introduced, the regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital. And the European Central Bank discounted all government bonds on equal terms. So commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate the bonds of the weaker countries to earn a few extra basis points. — George Soros

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line. — Tyler Cowen

To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Borders descendant from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that "we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained." "Lynch's Law," and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture - an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people. — Arthur Herman

The politicians looked after the mandarins. The mandarins looked after the central bankers and the regulators. (The governor of the Central Bank was paid more in 2008 than the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, as was the chief executive of the Financial Regulator.) The Central Bankers looked after the bankers. The bankers looked after IBEC. And IBEC looked after the government. The circle of oligarchs was watertight. — Shane Ross

The constant need for special waivers is symptomatic of poorly written public policy. It's a signal that the cost of compliance is unreasonably high; the benefits are hard to measure; and either legislators or regulators have failed to do their homework. — John Sununu

Emergency Valve Regulators," she repeated. "So you do know what your doing?
"Not really," he said yanking another wire. 'I made up that term to keep you happy. I'm just pulling all the red wires because they're the pretty ones. — Derek Landy

If we want our regulators to do better, we have to embrace a simple idea: regulation isn't an obstacle to thriving free markets; it's a vital part of them. — James Surowiecki

61 ULTIMATUMS Great Alamance Camp May 16th 1771 To the People now Assembled in Arms, who Style themselves Regulators In Answer to your Petition, I am to acquaint you that I have ever been attentive to the true Interest of this Country, and to that of every Individual residing — Diana Gabaldon

The financial collapse of 2008 got its start with predatory mortgages, that weren't sold by community banks and credit unions, they were sold by fly by night mortgage brokers who had almost zero federal oversight and then the big banks looked over, saw the profit potential and they wanted it bad. So they jumped in and sold millions of these terrible mortgages while the bank regulators just looked the other way. — Elizabeth Warren

Government regulators are another name for police. — James Cook

Regulators are a backstop: they don't own banks. The governance at the top of our leading banks has been shown to be lamentably weak. No one at the top of Barclays will take responsibility for systemic abuse. — Vince Cable