Judd Gregg: “I wished to rise to talk a little bit about the proposed stimulus package which is working its way through the Congress…”

“I wished to rise to talk a little bit about the proposed stimulus package which is working its way through the Congress and has been agreed to between the President and the Speaker of the House. First, I congratulate the Speaker, the Republican leader of the House, and the President, especially Secretary Paulson, for sitting down and trying to reach a bipartisan understanding as to how we move forward in what is obviously a very tentative economic time. We know in this Nation we are confronting some very serious issues, most of them brought on by a bubble in the credit markets relative to lending for housing construction. As happens with a classic bubble--and this is a classic bubble--when it bursts, when, in other words, the underlying security and the people responsible for paying back the debt cannot do that because money has been lent to people who are not in a position to repay their loans and the security under that debt has not been able to be maintained to reinstate the value of that debt, when that happens, that not only affects the loans, the immediate loans that are impacted, but it leads to a further contraction in the marketplace.…”