MARK ZANDI and ALAN BLINDER
"When all is said and done, the [government's]financial and fiscal policies will have cost taxpayers a substantial sum, but not nearly as much as most had feared and not nearly as much as if policymakers had not acted at all."
—Well-known economists, in a jointly authored report titled, "How the Great Recession was Brought to an End"
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HANK PAULSON
"Placing Fannie and Freddie in conservatorship was...the most effective of the stimulus efforts undertaken in the past two years."
—Former Treasury Secretary, in an op-edin the Washington Post
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JULIE STACKHOUSE
"I can assure you that there is no agenda to reduce the number of community banks. But with the challenges they are facing with commercial real estate and with profitability, it is going to be hard for some of the institutions to survive."
—Senior vice president of supervision at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
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BRIAN MOYNIHAN
"It's an unusual event for someone to regulate a particular transaction between two businesses and to only allow you to recover your costs."
—Bank of America's CEO, on the legislation that will reduce the interchange fees merchants pay on debit transactions
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KELLY KING
"I will tell you, from a long-term point of view, that concerns me probably personally more than anything else in the whole legislation."
—BB&T's CEO, on the Dodd-Frank Act's creation of a consumer financial protection bureau
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DON FOLEY
"I'm not in a position to tell you what you want to hear. I cannot tell you the problems I see and I cannot tell you when we might start to see things improve."
—Wilmington Trust's new CEO, on the uncertainty of working out its credit problems
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JEFF BRONCHICK
"Your opening speech was entirely inappropriate. What shareholders really want to know is... what the analysis and plan is, and what management changes you're going to make to address what in retrospect is an embarrassment of a bank."
—Chief investment officer at RCB Investment Management, addressing Foley during Wilmington Trust's second-quarter conference call
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CORNELIUS HURLEY
"Everybody knows that there are many technical changes that will need to be made. Any time that you slap stuff together at five in the morning, mistakes get made and need to be corrected."
—Professor at the Boston University School of Law, on why Congress will need to work on a corrections bill now that financial reform is done
