Wealth & Money Quote by Rick Perry

Perry’s line is built to smuggle a deregulatory argument past the usual villain of modern politics: “high interest rates.” By insisting “It doesn’t make any difference what the interest rate is,” he tries to flip the audience’s mental model of why credit is tight. The culprit, he says, isn’t monetary policy or market risk; it’s Washington paperwork. That move matters because it reframes a technical, sprawling law like Dodd-Frank into a simple moral story: rules “strangle” the little guy.

“Small community banks” is doing heavy rhetorical work. It’s a proxy for Main Street virtue, local relationships, and neighbor-to-neighbor trust. Perry isn’t defending “banks” in the abstract, a word that still carries post-2008 stigma; he’s defending the hometown lender forced to hire compliance staff instead of making loans. The repetition and stumbles (“they’re not - they’re not”) read less like careful policy talk and more like performative impatience: the tone of a man tired of experts, eager to sound like he’s stating the obvious.

The subtext is political triage after the financial crisis. Dodd-Frank was designed to prevent the kind of systemic blowups caused by large, complex institutions. Perry implicitly argues it missed its target and hit smaller banks with blunt, one-size-fits-all costs. “They can’t make any money” folds bank profitability into community welfare, asking listeners to accept that what’s good for a bank’s margins is, in this context, good for local borrowers. It’s a populist gloss on an industry complaint, engineered for a campaign season where “compliance” can be cast as a job-killer without naming the bigger fight: who should bear the price of safer finance.