Welcome to Politics Bites, where every afternoon at It's A Free Country, we bring you the unmissable quotes from the morning's political conversations on WNYC. Today on the Brian Lehrer Show, Deborah Solomon, financial policy writer for The Wall Street Journal, talked about delays in implementing  financial industry regulations and what impact they are likely to have on Wall Street profits.

Capital punishment

Since passage of the Dodd-Frank Act last summer, which placed new regulations and raised capital requirements on big banks, there's been a consistent effort from business interests and the political Right to repeal. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently renewed calls to do away with the law, citing an economic depression as grounds to leave financial institutions alone so they can get back to the business of lending.

Deborah Solomon said that banks are particularly miffed about being required to hold more capital in case of future crises. Exorbitant minimums make banks less able to put more money into the economy, they argue.

Checks and balance

Big banks may not like it, but some critics say that's a good thing. Excessive regulation could actually tax and burden too-big-to-fail banks out of existence, dispersing all the functions of complex and obscure financial giants into smaller, more focused, more easily governable bodies. Deborah Solomon said there was something to that argument, and that bad-tasting medicine might be best for everyone in the long term.