Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
Bannon: First of all, Benjamin, I can tell you I could hardly recognize you, you’re so
cleaned up you are for the conference.
[Laughter]
Questioner: Hello, my name is Deborah Lubov. I’m a Vatican correspondent for Zenit
news agency, for their English edition. I have some experience working in New York — I
was working for PricewaterhouseCoopers auditing investment banks, one of which was
Goldman Sachs. And considering this conference is on poverty, I’m curious — from your
point of view especially, your experience in the investment banking world — what
concrete measures do you think they should be doing to combat, prevent this
phenomenon? We know that various sums of money are used in all sorts of ways and they
do have different initiatives, but in order to concretely counter this epidemic now, what
are your thoughts?
“For Christians, and particularly for those who believe in the underpinnings of the
Judeo-Christian West, I don’t believe that we should have a [financial] bailout.”
Bannon: That’s a great question. The 2008 crisis, I think the financial crisis — which, by
the way, I don’t think we’ve come through — is really driven I believe by the greed, much
of it driven by the greed of the investment banks. My old firm, Goldman Sachs —
traditionally the best banks are leveraged 8:1. When we had the financial crisis in 2008,
the investment banks were leveraged 35:1. Those rules had specifically been changed by a
guy named Hank Paulson. He was secretary of Treasury. As chairman of Goldman Sachs,
he had gone to Washington years before and asked for those changes. That made the
banks not really investment banks, but made them hedge funds — and highly susceptible
to changes in liquidity. And so the crisis of 2008 was, quite frankly, really never recovered
from in the United States. It’s one of the reasons last quarter you saw 2.9% negative
growth in a quarter. So the United States economy is in very, very tough shape.
And one of the reasons is that we’ve never really gone and dug down and sorted through
the problems of 2008. Particularly the fact — think about it — not one criminal charge has
ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis. And in fact, it gets
worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken. So part of the prime drivers of the
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029074