Richard Shelby

For taxpayers to be fully repaid, General Motors' market capitalization would need to increase by about 14,000 percent--14,000 percent.

Had we recognized this at the outset and addressed each problem by order of priority and in a coordinated fashion, I believe our response would have been more effective and made better use of taxpayer resources.

Only then could we hope to develop an effective plan of action.

We believe that it is not the job of the Federal Government to be micromanaging companies.

Citigroup has received more than $300 billion in financial support from the Federal Government.

I expressed serious reservations about this plan because I did not believe that a massive and crude bailout bill was the most prudent course of action.

Like many Americans, I am stunned and angry that this fraud was allowed to happen.

Is it mind boggling to you, as you did your research and investigation here, that a fraud of such magnitude, $50 billion or more--I assume one of the largest the SEC has ever dealt with or failed to deal with--how could it have happened…

Given that failures occurred repeatedly and throughout different part of the Securities and Exchange Commission, can we assume that other similar frauds are likely occurring or have occurred without detection?

Are you concerned that even if your recommendations are implemented, we hope, that the culture of the SEC is such that examiners will be rewarded for focusing only on technical violations of the securities laws rather than the real…

Potentially fruitful leads were not pursued, while significant staff resources were devoted to running down clearly unproductive avenues.

The IG found that the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations and the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission were made aware at least six times that there might be something wrong in Madoff's firm.

Last January, right here in this room, a little more than 1 month after Bernard Madoff confessed to running a $50 billion multi-decade Ponzi scheme, this Committee held a hearing to try to understand how a fraud of that magnitude could go…

Investigations were unfocused, understaffed, and improperly documented.

Unfortunately, that hearing yielded few answers.

Communication across the SEC offices was so badly flawed that Madoff himself had to alert the New York examiners that their counterparts in the Washington office of the SEC had been looking at similar issues.

Unfortunately, the law that we passed in 2006 did not have time to take root before the problems that they were intended to remedy took their toll.

Widespread overreliance on ratings meant that the effects of poor quality or inadequately updated ratings could ripple through the markets.

Without that, there is no trust out there, is there?

Is it possible that ratings for certain instruments, such as more traditional bonds we have talked about, have a greater value as benchmarks than ratings provided for more complex and newer structured products, such as CDOs and CLOs?

How do we bring securitization back? How do we do this? I mean, it is based on trust, and maybe it is a brick at a time. But it worked so well for so long.

When I was Chairman of this Committee, we acted to address the problem after the SEC failed to take action on its own.

If you don't even have the expertise to be able to figure out who is a reliable advisor and who is not, you shouldn't be running a bond fund in the first place

How do we bring back what I thought we all benefited for a long time, and that is, securitization of mortgages?

Something has gone wrong. We both agree with that.