Meet the Press - March 12, 2023
Interview
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Well, Chuck, I have not gotten a briefing yet. But I think that your previous panel pretty much had it right on. The question will be, number one is, what are the excesses beyond the insured amounts and the ability to deal with those and the companies, in terms of meeting payrolls? The broader question will be, should the regulators have been on the ball to ensure that this bank could not have had this risk? And what else is out there, in this regard? As someone who sat in 2008 on the banking committee when we met with that last crisis, the goal is to try to avoid a crisis, not to deal with it. And that'll be questions that will be raised.
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Well, what I'm concerned is that we get it right, right? That doesn't mean over or underreaction. It's a question of getting it right. Did the regulators get it right? Did they allow this to take place in a way that's to be expected in the market, or should they have been more forward-leaning in saying to this and other banks, "Hey. You have risk here. You need to mitigate your risk"? That is something that we'll have to see in the days ahead.
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Well, it's served us well for a long time. And the question is where we are in the marketplace today, does that make sense? Of course, that would require additional insurance proceeds in order to cover it. That's a question to look forward in the future. But, you know, at the end of the day, depositors know that they're covered up to $250,000. So they can make choices to diversify their deposits, as well, so that they are less at risk of anything like this.
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Oh, I'm not ready to offer them a bailout by any stretch of the imagination. We have to see exactly everything that is pertinent to this specific set of circumstances and to see what else is out there, if anything else is out there that we should be thinking about.
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Well, this is one of our great challenges. President López Obrador talked about, when he took office, about, "Kisses, not bullets." Well, that's not working too well. The reality is along the border communities it is the cartels that run the border communities, not the government of Mexico. Mexico has a responsibility, first and foremost, to its own citizens to establish safety and security within its own territory and to those who visit its country, as well. And so we need to up, dramatically, in our engagement with Mexico. It can't be all about economics. It has to be about safety and security, as well. And I am afraid that we are headed in the wrong direction in Mexico on that and on democracy questions, as well. So this is a present danger that we have to deal with. And we have to engage the Mexicans in a way that says, "You've got to do a lot more on your security." We can help them. We have intelligence. We have other information we can share. But we need them to enforce in their own country.
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Well, slapping a designation isn't in and of itself going to change anything. The question is: How do you go after the cartels? How do you dry up their money? How do you go after their leadership? How do you put them away? How do you deny visas for Mexican government officials who ultimately are not engaging in the act of prosecution of the cartels? Those are some of the things that you can do that ultimately mean something at the end of the day.
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Well, that has a certain designation. We should save that for truly terrorist organizations in the world. Certainly, they are consequential to questions of national security. I'm more interested in doing something that ultimately seeks to destroy the cartels than to just name them. You know, you name them a foreign terrorist organization, that in and of itself means nothing. You ultimately go after their leadership. You jail them. You ultimately go after their money. You dry it up. You ultimately go after those who are supposed to be enforcing the law. And now you have a real consequence.
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Well, look. This is not about Secretary Mayorkas. It's about the administration. The best part of the administration's immigration policy over the first two years is that they ended family detention, which proved to be a failure under both the Obama and Trump administrations as a way to deter individuals from coming. What we need is a comprehensive plan to deal with the border, and what are the elements, the push and pull factors, that bring people to this country? We need to have a surge at the border that deals with asylum officers, uses border security, that ultimately can process those who have a legitimate claim for asylum and to deport those who have no legitimate claim for asylum. We'll need to find legal pathways so that people don't surge to the border because they are fleeing, because if my situation is I am in a country where staying means I will most certainly die, see my daughter raped or my son forced into a gang, I'm going to flee. Well, we need to understand that and deal with it. We need to work with Central American and the Mexican government to also be part of the solution. And lastly, we need to look at the question of temporary protected status in a way that ultimately helps us meet the challenges.
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The three biggest countries, by the way, Chuck, that are coming to the border now are Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua. They all have dictatorships, people fleeing those dictatorships. When the administration opened up a legal pathway for those fleeing, it dramatically saw the reduction. It's just an example of what you can do in a way that both is good for the border and preserves our nation as a nation that preserves asylum. But if not, if the administration does go down this path, I am afraid that the president will become the "Asylum Denier-in-Chief."
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Thank you.
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