We got a lot of excellent people and businesses from Bear and WaMu. But Bear definitely was more painful. WaMu got us into Florida, California, and other states, which was a huge benefit - to expand and grow and add middle-market, private banking, investment banking, and other products, too.

When you leave people behind, and those people who are left behind, it's not their fault, it's the leaders of the institutions. There's always going to be an elite. You can have an elite in a communist society. It is the leaders, something went wrong, and the leaders collectively are responsible.

The "third arrow" (of structural reform) is critically important. Japan has some of the best companies in the world, and if you look at their technology, their capability, it's extraordinary.

Banks don't want certain asset classes, and that's created opportunities for private equity, hedge funds, Silicon Valley. In this case I think he was referring to some of the European banks shedding assets, and the big buyers are probably not going to be big American banks. Someone like Blackstone may have a very good chance to buy those assets, leverage them, borrow up a little bit, and do something good there.

We're diversified, we're stable and consistent. Our businesses benefit from each other.

We have a lot of people who are Republicans, a lot of people who are Democrats, and it's not just because of business reasons.

We don't think there are cases where people were evicted out of homes when they shouldn't have been.