From last night’s All Stars:

On the prospect of bank nationalization:

It seems to me almost inevitable. What you have is banks which are essentially insolvent, and we’re not going to allow a run on the banks, on the customers of Citi in over 100 countries.
So we know that in the end–it’s like what we thought about Freddie and Fannie–in the end, people understood that the government would end up nationalizing it. And it did. It nationalized AIG as well.
Greenspan had said every 100 years you have to nationalize the banks. Well, twice a week the FDIC takes over a small bank. This is just a question of scale. It’s not a question of principle here.
I think it’s inevitable that Citi will be taken over–40 percent now, maybe 80 percent, and then 100 percent. And the way to do it–it’s a way of removing the toxic assets by subtraction. The idea of pulling them out of a living bank appears to be impossible, because nobody will agree on the value.
So what we do is we acquire the whole bank. We break it up and we sell off the good stuff, and then the government ends up with the toxic assets. It creates, essentially, a bad bank.
And I think that’s ultimately what is going to happen.

On the release of Guantanamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed:

This guy Binyam is a piece of work. He’s a Somali. He grew up in Britain. He ends up captured in Afghanistan.
His story is that he became a drug addict in Britain, and went over to Afghanistan to get off the drugs. Now, as we say in medicine, this is a reportable case. He would be the only person on the planet who goes to the country that is the greatest producer of opium on the planet to get off drugs.
Then he says he trained in an Al Qaeda camps, but only to fight in Chechnya. Well, if he can produce a diploma from terror university with a masters in advanced terrorism that is stamped for use only in Russia, I might give him a pass. But I don’t believe a word of it.
Look, he made his choice. He joined Al Qaeda, which in the ’90’s had declared war on the United States and on all Americans. He knew what he was doing.