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Chris Christie on Corporations |
A: Greed. And because no one wanted to tell anybody the truth. I think we got ourselves in this mess because some people in the financial industry became incredibly short-sighte and greedy and we had government officials who refused to say no.
Q: A lot of bankers have been bailed out, and then the first thing they do is award themselves massive bonuses. Would you have stopped that?
A: I probably wouldn't have done anything different to stop them to do that except to use the power of the bully pulpit as president to call attention to it and to try to shame them into doing something different. I don't believe in that kind of heavy-handed regulation where we're saying how muc you can pay people. But I do think that what really caused the problem was not so much the high-pay, was just the incredibly risky securities spreading kind of like a cancer that really caused the incredible downturn that we had in 2008 and 2009.