It's great that people get together and collaborate, talk about the facts and the analysis, all in the interest of having a great financial system.

I think one could argue that there's more political input into the regulatory side, and on the regulatory side there seem to be fewer people with financial and banking experience - there are more lawyers, academics, economists, maybe politicians now.

A lot of these things have hurt the average American. When they look at the banks and they say, "Well, the bank's talking its own game," I am telling you, what we've done in mortgage lending, our inability to have proper regulations around mortgages, has hurt average Americans. First-time buyers, immigrant buyers, prior defaults, self-employed, because they can't get a mortgage. Will it make a big difference to JPMorgan Chase? No, but you're hurting my fellow citizens. Let's go at it, and let's fix it.

Part of the concept of the euro zone was to establish a common market. The banks were going to bank across all their countries like we bank across states. But that concept got killed for a whole bunch of reasons that I won't get into. That was a good concept, by the way. It may yet return, because there are huge economies of scale in banking. That's another thing people don't quite get.

I believe it's a good thing that people say, "Can we find a way to live together in peace?" And they did, for the most part.

When the secretary of treasury, the head of the central bank, the head of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.), and the head of the New York Fed say, "We want you to do this because we think it's in the best interest of the United States of America," you know, we're like the Japanese. We're a little patriotic that way. We said, "Yes, sir!"

Finance went from being a small business, effectively, to being a big business. In part, that's the growth of the world's wealth. That's called savings.