You know, the benefit in life is to say, 'Maybe you made a mistake, let’s dig deep.'

We continued to build the business, even in the worst of times. We do business all over America.

If the government wants to do social policy, it should not be done in a quasi-public company. If you have a mortgage guarantee company which is done by the U.S. government, it should be guaranteed by the originators, i.e., the shareholder.

My father and grandfather were stockbrokers, and they would actually take stock certificates from a vault, give it to a runner, and send it to another vault. Then somebody said, "Let's digitize it and have one vault." Now the DTCC clears and settles almost everything, and the cost of doing a trade is a tenth of what it was before.

No one has the right to not assume that the business cycle will turn! Every five years or so, you have got to assume that something bad will happen.

Companies are returning a lot of money to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. And a lot of people say that's not a good use of capital. I think that's normal reallocation of capital.

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.