Elizabeth Warren Quotations | Page 3

The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this crisis. They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And then they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis. It's perfect circularity.

It takes money to run political campaigns. This is a cancer growing on the soul of our democracy.

The financial services industry has seemed to treat the crisis like a little rainfall - inconvenient, but no significant changes needed. The real question moving forward is how the industry will respond to Wall Street reform and growing public anger.

There's a lot of research on the shift in who deals with money when families get in trouble. In good times, husbands handle the family's finances about 80 percent of the time. But when times turn sour and families start dealing with creditors and managing unpayable bills, women take more active roles.

Women tend to vote the economic interests of their families and to speak out on family economic issues. For men, there's often much more focus on the idea of personal failure: "If I'm not winning this great economic game, it must be my fault."

We [US government] have used our taxpayer dollars not only to subsidize these banks but also to subsidize the creditors of those banks and the equity holders in those banks. We could have talked about forcing those investors to take some serious hits on their risky dealings. The idea that taxpayer dollars go in first rather than last - after the equity has been used up - is shocking.

The need for comprehensive reform must not blind us to the urgency of addressing the massive debt that's already crushing our young people.

Refinancing won't fix everything that's broken with our [American] higher education system. We've got to bring down the cost of college. And we need more accountability for how schools spend federal dollars.

Student loan debt is crushing young people. And so they're not doing the things we would expect them to do. They're not moving out of their parents' homes in as big a numbers, they're not saving up money for down payments, they're not buying homes or cars or starting small businesses or doing any of the things that help move this economy forward.

Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.