My father and grandfather were stockbrokers, and they would actually take stock certificates from a vault, give it to a runner, and send it to another vault. Then somebody said, "Let's digitize it and have one vault." Now the DTCC clears and settles almost everything, and the cost of doing a trade is a tenth of what it was before.
If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that's business. I'm doing it because I'm serving you; I'm not doing it because I want to be universal.
Banks also have to say no to customers. We can't always give clients what they want; it may not be in the client's best interest.
If you can't use dividends, it's not a bad thing to give it back to your shareholders. They'll use it somewhere else.
I don't think you're going to have one bank. Big companies aren't going to give us all their business. So they can pick and choose - by product, by country, whatever. We have major competition across every product in every place we operate.
Wall Street gives money to both [Democrats and Republicans] because they want to be on the good side of whoever becomes president .
When you walk into a store and you want to buy something, you give them cash and they sell it to you. But very often, you walk into our "store" and you want something - a credit card, maybe, or a loan - and very often the answer is "No," even if you're a large corporation.
The United States has the best, deepest, widest, and most transparent capital markets in the world which give you, the investor, the ability to buy and sell large amounts at very cheap prices. That is a good thing.
