Wealth & Money Quote by Dan Quayle

Quayle’s line has the blunt, accidental candor of a soundbite that wanders into a confession. By pinning bank failures on depositors who “don’t deposit enough money,” it flips the basic moral logic of finance: customers are recast not as people entrusting savings to professionals, but as unpaid shock absorbers for executive errors. The phrasing is almost perfect in its bureaucratic cruelty. “Cover losses due to mismanagement” is a clinical euphemism for a very human story - bad bets, lax oversight, incentives built to privatize upside and socialize downside.

The specific intent reads like defensive politics in an era when deregulation and the savings-and-loan wreckage made “mismanagement” too awkward to say plainly, yet too common to deny. If you can relocate blame downward, you can protect the legitimacy of the system upward: bank leadership, regulators, and lawmakers become background scenery while ordinary depositors are asked to feel responsible for not having been richer, more generous, or more clairvoyant.

The subtext is a worldview where risk is everyone’s problem except the people paid to manage it. It’s also a neat preview of later crisis rhetoric: the public is told the institution is “too important” to fail, but the public is also faulted for not pre-paying the bailout through greater participation.

Context matters here because deposit insurance and prudential regulation exist precisely to prevent this logic from becoming policy. Quayle’s line works culturally because it exposes, in one mangled sentence, the quiet expectation that trust should be infinite, while accountability remains optional.