Last Week in Words

MONDAY
"Throughout the second half of last year, mortgage bankers were freaking out."

— Tom Millon, CEO of Capital Markets Cooperative, on the bankers' so-far-unfounded fear that if the Fed stopped buying mortgage-backed securities, it would cause market havoc

TUESDAY
"We will not fail. We will have reform this year."

— Chris Dodd, Chairman, Senate Banking Committee, after his panel voted 13 to 10 to send financial reform to the full Senate

WEDNESDAY
"You have to ask whether our fragmented system really did us any harm, and I think you can argue quite definitively that it did. Part of it is that we don't hold our regulators and supervisors accountable for anything in particular because they're responsible for everything."

— Richard Herring, a banking professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, in comparing the U.S. regulatory system to other countries' regimes

THURSDAY
"If they do not get rid of the subscale local branch networks, it means they've abandoned their sensible policy of understanding regional and local policies of scale in banking."

— Prof. Bruce Greenwald of Columbia University Business School on Wells Fargo's strategic plan for Wachovia branches it inherited in New York City

FRIDAY
"This program is death by a thousand cuts. It has failed. It has failed miserably. And we are incapable of saying this was an experiment and it didn't work. Let's try something else."

— Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., on the Obama administration's foreclosure prevention program