Washington, September 15: President Barack Obama went to Wall Street to tell the nation’s bankers that they “owe a debt to the American people” and must stop getting in the way of reforms needed to prevent a repeat of the credit crisis.
Exactly after a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers sparked a full-blown financial panic, the President warned that a “return to normalcy cannot lead to complacency”, and he demanded that banks curb excessive bonuses and submit to a raft of new regulations.
He attacked the purveyors of “revisionist histories, or selective memory, who don’t seem to recall what we went through last year” and added: “To them I’d say only this: do you believe that the absence of sound regulation one year ago was good for the financial system? Do you believe the resulting decline in markets and wealth and employment was good for the economy?”
—Agencies