Backporch

Robert Bostrom
"I'm not personally convinced that size equals trouble or that size plus activities equals trouble. The financial crisis was a 200-year event in the making that would have happened regardless of how big the banks were."

Partner at the law firm SNR Denton and general counsel for Freddie Mac from 2006 until last year, on whether the big banks should be broken up.

Sandy Weill
"What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking."

Former Citigroup CEO, who figured prominently in the1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, in an about-face so shocking that a Salon.com writer compared it to Genghis Khan making a deathbed conversion to pacifism.

Sen. Tom Coburn
"Its record of enforcement at HSBC resembles a lapdog rather than the watchdog that we sorely need."

Oklahoma Republican, criticizing the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, after a scathing report about billions of dollars in money-laundering transactions going undetected for years at the global banking giant.

Beth Mooney
"My reaction is let's suit up and get on with the game."

KeyCorp's chairman and CEO, arguing that regional banks like hers now have a competitive advantage, given the impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on both larger and smaller competitors.

Jon Stewart
"You know, there are all these conspiracy theories about the world's financial system being controlled by six Illuminati members in the basement of the Vatican. It's actually just 16 London lunch buddies."

"The Daily Show" host, equating the bankers that manipulated Libor with the villains of "The Da Vinci Code".

Andrew Lo
"This dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scams in the history of markets."

Finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the Libor scandal.

Steve Dewald
"They're just another card processor that doesn't care about their customers."

Square's head of strategic planning and analysis, refuting speculation that his mobile payments startup might partner with PayPal someday.

Stephen Steinour
"We need to have a fiscal plan. It doesn't even have to be a good one."

Chairman, president and CEO of Huntington Bancshares in Columbus, Ohio, saying political gridlock over U.S. economic policy is dampening loan demand from businesses.

Devin Leary-Hanebrink
"I propose a new definition for the acronym CFPB: Choking Financial Professionals and Businesses."

Senior compliance specialist at Hancock Bank in Gulfport, Miss., in an op-ed calling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau an example of unnecessary overregulation.

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