Wealth & Money Quote by Earl Warren

A judge saying "I hate banks" lands like a bench-slamming objection: blunt, unvarnished, and deliberately unsentimental. Earl Warren isn’t diagnosing an abstract flaw in capitalism; he’s issuing a moral verdict on an institution that, in his view, has learned to present self-protection as public service. The phrasing is prosecutorial. "They do nothing positive" is an absolute claim meant to strip banks of their favorite alibi: that they merely facilitate growth. Then he tightens the charge with motive and method: "take care of themselves", a crisp theory of the case.

The line works because it targets the asymmetry at the heart of modern finance. "First in with their fees" evokes a world where risk is privatized downward and certainty flows upward. Fees are the bank’s guaranteed harvest, collected regardless of whether the underlying deal helps a community, a family, or a business. "First out when there's trouble" is the real indictment: banks as fair-weather partners who socialize consequences while preserving their own escape routes, legal shields, and political leverage.

Context matters. Warren’s adult life spans the Great Depression, bank failures, New Deal regulation, wartime mobilization, and the postwar consolidation of corporate power. From a judicial perspective, he would have seen the human residue of financial crises: foreclosures, bankruptcies, towns hollowed out by credit drying up. The subtext is populist but not naive: institutions that claim to manage risk often become experts at exporting it. Warren is naming that betrayal in language plain enough to be understood outside any courtroom.