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

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

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

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

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

The financial markets, I believe, got over-levered. I think lending standards declined.

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.

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

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

My general impression of what is going on in Afghanistan--I was initially very skeptical when I went over there. I thought we got an honest assessment. I thought they talked about the positives, the negatives, and the challenges ahead. I…

First of all, we were flying over the Kandahar Province in the southern part of Afghanistan in these Black Hawk helicopters, visiting a few of the forward operating bases--one for training, the other one for trying to provide stability for…

I asked the question: How much money are we spending now, how much money is going to be needed in the future, and for how long is that money going to be needed? ... I think a conservative estimate, for many years to come, is that we are…