Quotes from Neil Barofsky

He was the Inspector General for TARP.  These quotes are from an interview with Gretchen Morgenson.

• “The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”  
• “Treasury had failed to ensure that the servicers had the necessary infrastructure to support a massive mortgage modification program.” It barely got off the ground, and few homeowners have received the help they hoped for. 
• “There has to be wide-scale acknowledgment that regulatory capture exists, dominates our system and needs to be eradicated,”
• “We need to re-educate our regulators that it’s O.K. to be adversarial, that it’s not going to hurt your career advancement to be more skeptical and more challenging,” he said. “It’s implicit in so much of the regulatory structure that if you don’t make too many waves there will be a job for you elsewhere. So we have to limit those job opportunities and develop a more professional path for regulators as a career. That way, they won’t always have that siren call of Wall Street.” 
• “So much of what’s wrong with Dodd-Frank is it trusts the regulators to be completely immune to the corrupting influences of the banks,” he said in the interview. “That’s so unrealistic. Congress has to take a meat cleaver to these banks and not trust regulators to do the job with a scalpel.”  
• “Incentives are baked into the system to take advantage of it for short-term profit,” he said. “The incentives are to cheat, and cheating is profitable because there are no consequences.”