There seems to be a consensus emerging among regulators and many in Congress on the need for a Council to address risks in the financial system.

Much of the responsibility for setting standards would remain with the Federal Reserve, which raises serious concerns given its failure in recent years to identify serious risks to our financial system.

Many of us in Congress, led by Senator Durbin, tried to include in the TARP legislation a provision that could have kept millions of families in their homes at zero cost--zero cost--to the taxpayers.

This proposal would have corrected an anomaly in the Bankruptcy Code that prohibits judges from modifying primary residence mortgages the way they can modify every other type of contract.

I just want to observe that it takes a bold legislator to want to go back into that blasted wasteland, and I'm delighted that you are doing it.

Well, it has been a long ordeal for our witnesses. So, all I will say is that we look forward to your practical, forward looking and optimistic voices around here.

I want to first of all thank you for holding this hearing, and I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony today.

When are you going to stop the bleeding?

My perception today is this mortgage crisis is of the same scale in terms of threatening our economy and perhaps world recovery.

We are not even making a dent.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate very much my friend from Missouri's passionate defense of union wage scales and the kind of middle class life that unionized employment can bring to the middle class.

You are asking the impossible.

You can't get credit if you don't have a job.

We have got to move aggressively on both fronts.

All those wonderful programs that you are talking about mean absolutely nothing to the American people.

there is a very strong do nothing caucus in the Senate. Their emotion is fear, their goal is doubt...

The mortgage crisis is escalating, not rescinding.