We need financial regulation that allows businesses and the banks they use to have access to the tools that help keep prices of consumer goods - like groceries and home heating oil - steady, while ensuring that the taxpayers are never again on the hook for the types of wild bets that helped crash the economy in 2008.
Soon after the financial crisis of 2008, I was at a meeting in Washington with a group of U.S. senators. They had invited me to provide a point of view on new regulation; regulation aimed at ensuring we never have to go through the events of 2008 ever again.
I bet taxpayers remember providing more than $812 billion to Citigroup and Bank of America, two Wall Street banks, in 2009 to bail them out during the 2008 financial crisis. Taxpayers remember that generosity; big banks evidently don't.
North Carolina is home to some of the largest financial institutions in the country, and a vibrant network of community banks. We're a banking state, and we're proud of that distinction. But we also understand that responsible financial regulation protects consumers and businesses.
You know, oil prices from 2007, on the strength of a very robust global economy and a very robust emerging China, many of you will recall, ramped up to near $150 a barrel. Then we had the financial - U.S. financial collapse. Oil prices collapsed all the way down to $40 a barrel.
We need sobriety, rationality, and civility in the discussions on the regulation of financial institutions so that the banks can return in a robust manner to their central role in funding the economy.
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.
Why do we have financial crises? Why do banks lose money? If history is any guide, it hasn't often been the result of speculative bets. It has been the result of banks making loans to individuals and businesses who can't pay them back.
Banks are concerned the central bank is imposing too many regulations. If the trend continues, we'll swing to heavy regulation. We need to have balanced regulation to encourage the economy.
One nation banking recognises that banks must not be isolated from the rest of the economy. Because banks and small businesses must succeed or fail together, banks must lend to small businesses so we can get the growth and jobs we need for the future. As things stand, that is not happening enough. Lending was down £10.8billion last year.
Small businesses have suffered under the demands of Obamacare and community banks have scaled back lending due to stringent provisions of Dodd-Frank financial regulation.
The ECB puts out money that is meant to help our banks, but they do not use it to finance our businesses, but they give it to them to buy back their debt, to help French and German banks.
But our system of regulation must keep up with this. If it fails to keep up, it will hold back economic expansion. We need financial market regulation that works at national and European level.
There is also a concern that there is a lack of demand of oil. And so when commodity prices fall, it's good if you happen to be a consumer, but it's sometimes seen as symptom of a weakening economy.
Rising inequality can create a more highly leveraged economy, and it can then make the economy vulnerable to a crash like 2008.
Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.
We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.