Elizabeth Warren:  

We destabilized an entire American system and worldwide economic system one family at a time. We started it right down at the basic level. So when we're going to talk about regulatory reform -- in the 1930s, we started it by making it safe to put money in banks. We need to start regulatory reform in 2009 right down at the family level, to just get a market for credit that works for families. You don't have to pretend ...

Charlie Rose:  

But I love the objective. How do we do that?

Elizabeth Warren:  

We know how to do this. How did we make water safe? How did we make the paper not have arsenic in it? And your suit have, you know, be properly labeled for what it had?

This is what government actually does. It supports markets by creating agencies that say, hey, you just have to be -- you have to disclose, right, you've got to have some minimum safety standards.

We've done this over and over. We've done it with food labeling. We've made sure that little babies' carseats don't collapse on impact, that we don't have lead in children's toys. We ultimately have a baseline safety for every product you taste, touch, smell, feel, but we don't have it for credit products.

Charlie Rose:  

OK. If you were going to put together a committee to recommend to the president of the United States, chairman of the Fed, what the regulations for the future which will shape the next 50 years are going to be, who should do this? It ought to be in the full light of air.

Elizabeth Warren:  

Right. So I would say, let's ask Congress to give us a new agency. Right? We're going to have one more thing in government. We've taken care of the safety, we've taken care of our environment, we've taken care of food and drugs, we've taken care of basic consumer products that you buy and sell, meat, agricultural products. Let's do one for credit products, basic safety so that the markets can work.

Ultimately, I'm real free-market girl. I mean, I truly believe markets bring us enormous riches. They let us do lots of things, including they let us be stupid. And... [...]

And we should hold people responsible for being stupid. What we shouldn't do are have markets that are designed around tricking people.

We have to come back to the notion that government really has a function in America. It has the function of creating kind of these basic safety -- think about how the world -- how well markets have worked. [...]