Andrew Ross Sorkin

And obviously, there's still political questions about that, frankly, to this day.

But from an economic perspective, mathematically, I think you can say to yourself and look at what happened.

We did not fall into the kind of depths of a crisis with the kind of length of crisis that clearly happened in 1929.

And I would even argue if you go and look at what happened during the pandemic.

you know, again, we threw an extraordinary amount of money into the system to prevent a true financial calamity.

And to a large degree, it worked.

Having said that, every time we do these bailouts, we add even more debt to our problems.

And I think there are people who worry rightfully that there will be a breaking point, which is to say at some point,

You will attempt to bail out the system once again.

And bondholders around the world will say, you know what, United States, we're happy to buy your treasuries, but you're going to have to pay us a lot more money to bear the risk because we're not sure you'll ever really be able to pay us back.

I mean, there are so many parts of our economy today that you could argue are like utilities for our country and our world.

The banks underlie so much of what we do.

you know, we bailed out airlines during the pandemic.

They are a public utility in terms of just the ability to transport people and therefore economic growth around the nation and around the world.

And I think now we're starting to see it even with what might be described as cloud providers, you know, folks who basically allow us to access the internet.

That unto itself in many ways has become a utility in the same way that we think about electricity and

and water as a utility in our daily lives.

And yet, all of these things, for the most part, or a lot of these things that we're describing, are run by private institutions, some of which are more or less regulated than others.

Let me explain the shadow banking thing because I think it's important.

After 2008 and the financial crisis that we had there, we decided to regulate our banking system in a much more meaningful way, frankly, which made it harder for banks to lend money the way they had before.