Kerry: Wall St. practices suffer from 'lack of patriotism'

Wall Street officials suffered from a "lack of patriotism" in their practices during the financial crisis, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Wednesday.

Kerry, a senior Democrat in the Senate, suggested that Wall Street showed a disregard for the public good during the run up to the financial crisis in the fall of 2008.

"I think people really just sense that there's a lack of patriotism in it -- there's a lack of concern about the country," Kerry said on "Imus in the Morning" on the Fox Business Network. "It's just, 'Hey, let's just make our money and run. Devil be damned what the implications are.'"

Kerry expressed the same kind of frustrations his colleagues did toward executives from Goldman Sachs, who were grilled on the Capitol on Tuesday for its own practices before the financial crisis. Senators expressed anger toward the officials, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein, for what they perceived to be as a cavalier attitude about the firm's business practices.

Kerry, who is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said that he understood the short-selling practices that firms like Goldman used in some of its divisions to bet against some of the products offered by its other divisions.

"Everybody knows that people short, and shorting is not new to the marketplace. We all understand that," Kerry said. "I do think, though, that when you have a sense that there is something wrong in the entire structure, and you're playing to that with the kind of numbers that they were, and as broadly as they were, you're really contributing to the chaos that followed."

Wall Street, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee said, had a responsibility to address flaws in the financial system, instead of looking to profit off of them.

"The numbers of jobs lost, the depreciation in value of homes across the country, and all this," he said. "They really had a financial responsibility to start pushing some buttons, making some calls -- not just sitting there, figuring out how much they were going to make off of the disaster."