Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Ann Warren is an American academic and politician. She is a member of the Democratic Party, and is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts. Warren was formerly a professor of law, and taught at the University of Texas School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and most recently at Harvard Law School. A prominent scholar specializing in bankruptcy law, Warren was among the most cited in the field of commercial law before starting her political career...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth22 June 1949
CityOklahoma City, OK
CountryUnited States of America
Personal responsibility matters. There are no excuses for those who spend money on things they cannot afford. But it's a whole lot harder to act responsibly when consumer credit contracts are designed to be incomprehensible, when prices are obscure and risks are hidden.
I don't want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes.
Big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher. If the playing field is leveled and the broken market fixed, a lot more money will stay in the pockets of millions of hard-working families. That's real stimulus - money to families, without increasing our national debt.
The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this crisis. They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And then they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis. It's perfect circularity.
It takes money to run political campaigns. This is a cancer growing on the soul of our democracy.
Women tend to vote the economic interests of their families and to speak out on family economic issues. For men, there's often much more focus on the idea of personal failure: "If I'm not winning this great economic game, it must be my fault."
The need for comprehensive reform must not blind us to the urgency of addressing the massive debt that's already crushing our young people.
Refinancing won't fix everything that's broken with our [American] higher education system. We've got to bring down the cost of college. And we need more accountability for how schools spend federal dollars.
Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.
The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.
I'm really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial.
Some of the largest financial institutions can build a profit model on tricking people.
The game is rigged to work for those who already have money and power.
Part of my job is to make sense of all that I hear, and to retell it in a forceful way so that the decision-makers at Treasury can hear it. At least that's how I see it.