John Ensign

I hope that is what the financial regulatory reform focuses on.

There is a lot of spin that happened in your terminology in dealing with all these financial products.

I think for anybody to defend what the rating agencies did would be ludicrous at this point.

I think part of this hearing is to find out whether you were actually market manipulators instead of just market makers.

I want to go to a deal that Goldman Sachs did, known as Hudson 1.

And Goldman obviously recognized that there was some significant risk with that particular product, and that is why they sold them short, correct?

I think that Wall Street definitely had a role in the financial crisis, but I also think we have a responsibility here on our end.

And do you think that that maybe appeared--has at least an appearance of a potential conflict of interest?

I think most people in Las Vegas would take offense at having Wall Street compared to Las Vegas, because in Las Vegas actually people know that the odds are against them.

I think it is one of the reasons that I believe very strongly we need to fix the markets, we need to have a lot more transparency.

Yes, but it operated the same way as cash being in there, didn't it?

How do you justify taking BBB-rated products, repackaging them, and getting the rating agencies to re-rate those as AAA-rated products?