Leadership Quote by Howard Dean

“Second of all” is the tell: Dean is mid-argument, not delivering a polished aphorism. That offhand sequencing signals impatience with the usual deference to finance. He’s not trying to sound lofty; he’s trying to sound like the adult in the room who’s done watching the same people wreck the kitchen and demand another set of keys.

The line turns on a deceptively technocratic phrase: “allocating capital.” In Econ 101 terms, that’s Wall Street’s social license - the justification for its outsized profits, cultural prestige, and political power. Dean’s intent is to revoke that license. By framing Wall Street as failing at its basic job, he’s not critiquing greed as a moral flaw; he’s accusing the system of breach of contract. The subtext is blunt: if finance isn’t funding productive investment, then it’s just rent-seeking dressed up as innovation.

“Even after the shameful performance of the last two years” pins the context to the post-crisis era, when promises of reform were everywhere and consequences were scarce. “Shameful” does rhetorical work: it drags the story out of the realm of complex instruments and into public accountability. Dean also uses “supposed to” to invoke a shared standard, inviting listeners to feel cheated, not merely alarmed.

It’s a populist critique with a policy spine: stop treating Wall Street as an end in itself; judge it by whether it serves the real economy.