When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.
No matter how the financial system is set up, no matter what the economic system is, as long as you have people, you're going to have financial crises; you're going to have bubbles that manifest themselves in the financial system.
As a steward of the U.S.economy and financial systems, the Treasury has helped lay the groundwork for the American economy to become a model of strength, flexibility, dynamism, resiliency. This is a system that generates growth, creates jobs and wealth, rewards initiative, and fosters innovation.
An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention.
As the Indian government has embraced greater economic openness, the creativity and expertise of the Indian workforce has been unleashed onto the world economic stage.
If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.
Every good businessman or woman carefully analyzes all the available facts before making a decision.
There is big resistance from vested interests in China that don't want to open up to competition.
I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.
When you look at territorial disputes, there are good arguments on any sides. I think it's important that we don't take sides on legitimacy.
I think all governments engage in intelligence gathering vis-a-vis other governments.
Foreclosure is to no one's benefit. I've heard estimates that mortgage investors lose 40 to 50 percent on their investment if it goes into foreclosure.
For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system.
When our markets work, people throughout our economy benefit - Americans seeking to buy a car or buy a home, families borrowing to pay for college, innovators borrowing on the strength of a good idea for a new product or technology, and businesses financing investments that create new jobs.
I'm telling you that there is no silver bullet to keep home prices from going down or to prevent all foreclosures.
If you've got a bazooka, and people know you've got it, you may not have to take it out.
If the only way you can do well is working more hours than someone else, you're going to lose out because there's always going to be someone who is going to work more.
I am suspicious of career engineers, people that plan it out every step of the way.
I'd have liked to have been another Faulkner, of course.
China saves too much, produces too much, sells too much to Americans and consumes too little.
When you have a big, ugly problem, there's never going to be a neat, elegant solution that is totally painless or without a cost.
The financial security of all Americans - their retirement savings, their home values, their ability to borrow for college, and opportunities for more and higher-paying jobs - depends on our ability to restore our financial institutions to sound footing.
Every global concern - economic, environmental or security-related - can be addressed more effectively when the U.S. and China work together.
I think it is asking a lot for regulators to be perfect - because they won't be.
Frankly I'm a bit concerned when it comes to U.S.-China relations.
It's hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.
Many of the Western democracies - including the U.S. - have a problem that voters want benefits they don't want to pay for.
I grew up with a strong set of values - and one was never judging someone by how much money they had.
No bank should be too big or too complex to fail, but almost any bank is too big to liquidate quickly, particularly in the midst of a crisis.
The income disparity is a huge issue. And I think that the only solution to this - there is no easy solution - are fundamental changes. That the world is changing quicker than our policies are changing. And we need the kinds of policies that will let us have a competitive economy going forward.
Large financial institutions in this country will always play a role that is essential to our economic growth. But they must only be permitted to grow and interconnect, throughout our economy, under careful oversight and with a mechanism for allowing those connections to be broken safely.
The idea of being Treasury secretary in the abstract appealed to me, but my initial inclination was that it wasn't right for me to take that step.
One of the most constant aspects of American life is change - and nowhere is it more evident than in our financial markets.
I don't take lightly ever putting the taxpayer on the line to support an institution.
As long as I can remember, I had a strong interest in fishing, and my parents, even though they had never fished or camped, took us on canoe camping trips in the wilderness of Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, where I could fish to my heart's content.
Let's not forget, what TARP did allowed us to move overnight and put capital into hundreds of banks, and that money came back plus $32 billion.
