Obama doesn't really answer woman's interest rate Q. Believes banks 'too big to fail.' Explains why

[flpoljunkie]

Q. Since American taxpayers have had to bail out a lot of large banks -- Citibank, et cetera -- and they don't feel they've gotten any benefit for themselves, do you support caps on interest rates that the same companies we have bailed out with our money can charge regular consumers on credit cards? Because it's up to 30 and 40 percent. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: It's a great question. It's a great question. It's a great question. This was a really good question. First of all -- first of all, I generally support a credit card bill of rights, even -- setting aside the whole issue of TARP and who's been getting TARP and who hasn't been getting TARP. The truth of the matter is that the banking industry has used credit cards and pushed credit cards on consumers in ways that have been very damaging.

There's a woman named Elizabeth Warren who's a professor at Harvard who did a great deal of study around this. And she made a simple point. You know, if you bought a toaster, and the toaster blew up in your face, there would be a law, a consumer safety law, that would protect you from buying that toaster. But if you get a credit card that blows up in your face, that starts off at zero-percent interest, and once they kind of suck in the -- buying a bunch of stuff and suddenly it's 29 percent; and if you're late two days, suddenly, you know, you just paid another $30, and all kinds of fine print that a lot of folks didn't understand -- well, somehow that's okay.

So just putting aside the issue of TARP, I think generally having some consumer safety, some consumer protection around credit cards, is important. Now, all of us -- I think a lot of people have learned their lesson with credit cards. And credit cards can be an important convenience. But generally speaking, if you're just running up your credit card and you don't think that there's a bill to be paid, you've got problems. So all of us, I think, have to be more thoughtful about how we use them, and ultimately we've got to take responsibility if we are going on shopping sprees that we can't afford.

On the other hand, it's also important that we have consumer safety laws, and that's something that I want to promote and get done as President of the United States.

Now, let me talk about the larger issue of banks just for a second. Because a lot of people, I know, just are so frustrated -- and I am so frustrated with this banking situation, I just want to just briefly explain to you sort of what's happened.

These banks purchased a lot of what are securitized mortgage instruments. They took a lot of these subprime loans and they bundled them up, so they weren't just holding a mortgage, they were holding a whole bundle of mortgages that were made into a security, a stock. And they were sliced up, and so you could buy different pieces of these mortgages. And unfortunately what ended up happening was a bunch of these mortgages -- and this was certainly true in California, it was true all across the country -- a bunch of these mortgages were based on people who never had the income to buy the house, nobody tried to verify whether or not they could actually afford it. It was based on these complicated mathematical formulas.

And then what happened -- and this is where AIG and some other companies come in -- what happened was since the banks knew that there might be some risk around having these financial instruments, they bought these things called credit default swaps that were supposed to be guarantees or insurance on these instruments -- on these securities, these mortgage-backed securities.

The problem was, companies like AIG, they'd sell, like, 50 policies without having the money to cover the possibility that they would all go belly-up. So they were way over-leveraged, overextended, just as the banks were way over-leveraged and overextended. And in some cases they'd take a dollar worth of assets and they'd loan or use $30 off that one dollar just to make bigger and bigger bets and take bigger and bigger risks out in the financial system. And these started getting into trillions of dollars.

And as long as nobody was checking to see if anybody was going to be able to pay back these mortgages, and as long as housing prices were appreciating and this housing bubble was continuing, everybody was making a lot of money. So nobody wanted to check and there was no serious regulation to say, hold on, stop a minute, you guys are getting way overextended; you're putting the entire financial system at risk.

So when the economy started slowing down, and in some markets like Miami and here in California, the housing market starts really weakening, and suddenly some of these subprime loans start defaulting, this whole house of cards just began to collapse.

Now, a lot of people say, well, why not just let the banks fail? Right? See, somebody is clapping. Why not just, you know -- they were making all these bad bets; why don't we just let them fail, let them go bankrupt? What's the problem?

Well, here's the problem. If you've just got one small bank -- I mean, unfortunately -- let's take the community bank -- what's the name of your community bank? Fullerton Community Bank. All right, now, let's just say this. If Fullerton Community Bank fails, heaven forbid, we've got something called the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, that would take it over, it would guarantee all the deposits so you don't have to worry about your deposits; they're not at risk. And it would be able to kind of sort things out and then resell the bank fairly quickly, and it doesn't threaten the whole system as a whole.

When you've got big banks, Citicorp or Bank of America or, you know, Wells Fargo, that controls 70 percent of the banking system, and all of them are weakening, you can't afford to have all those banks all at once start going under. Even though the deposits might be guaranteed, you've got the entire economy resting on that credit. We've got to get that credit lending, because they can take down businesses large and small alike if we don't make sure that they are still providing loans.

And so we had to step in. And it was the right thing to do -- even though it's infuriating, even though it makes you angry, because you're thinking, I was responsible, and these folks are irresponsible, and somehow I'm paying for them -- it was the right thing to do to step in.

The same is true with AIG. It was the right thing to do to step in. Here's the problem. It's almost like they've got -- they got a bomb strapped to them and they've got their hand on the trigger. You don't want them to blow up, but you got to kind of talk them -- ease that finger off the trigger.

We've got to, over the next several months, come up with a plan that separates out the bad assets, the loans that shouldn't have been made, these credit default swaps, et cetera. We got to separate out some of those from the good assets, because there are a lot of very healthy banks, the vast majority of banks are healthy. We've got to figure out how to raise their capital -- the point that you were making earlier so that they can start lending again.

This is a very complicated, difficult task. It's not easy. We're talking about a huge system that's not just national, but international.

And so we're not going to unwind this all in a day, but what I do have confidence in is that with the plans that we're putting forward, slowly you're starting to see the system stabilize,you're starting to see more loan activity taking place, some of the security markets are coming back. And if we continue to provide some guarantees and help depositors and help strengthen some of the banks that are weakened, then my expectation is, is that we're going to be able to work our way out of this problem, and we are going to be able to get back to a point where banks are lending, businesses are investing, jobs are being created, and the economy gets back on its feet.

And when that happens, we should get a bunch of the money that has been lent to these banks back. Now, we're not going to get all of it. I just -- you know, we're not going to get 100 percent of it back in some cases. In some cases we may get 100 percent back; in some cases we might even make a profit.

I don't want to pretend that this is going to be cheap. But the point is that instead of looking backwards, the main thing we've got to do is look forwards and say, how do we make sure that we get out of this mess, but also prevent this mess from ever happening again. And that requires the kind of financial regulation that's going to be so important for our long-term future. (Applause.)

http://thepage.time.com/full-remarks-of-obama-at-costa-mesa-town-hall/