Richard Shelby

Well, I hope we are going to have a lot of hearings on this, Mr. Chairman.

This is a real departure from, as you said in your paper, from the model that we have relied on for a long time.

Is your premise basically trying to take risk out of a marketplace? And if there is no risk, there is no marketplace, is there?

Well-regulated and transparent financial markets have been and must continue to be one of the central goals of our financial regulatory system.

Why did you choose such a politically biased construct at this point knowing that would raise red flags for some?

Individuals consistently make choices that they themselves agree diminish their own well-being in significant ways.

I believe this Committee should examine what caused this financial crisis, develop solutions to the problems identified by that examination.

I hope you don't go too far here, or we don't.

You do not say that, but that is what the result would be.

We do learn from those mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are quite costly.

I would like to just restate a request I made in my opening statement.

Good consumer protection, therefore, makes good economic sense.

We cannot afford the status quo. We must act now to put a plan in place that protects consumers and investors, saves jobs, and ensures the integrity of our financial system.

To rebuild confidence in our financial system, both here at home and around the world, we must reconstruct our regulatory framework.

Stronger consumer protection could have stopped this crisis before it started.

Let's put a cop on that beat so that the spectacular failure of consumer protection at the root of this mess is never repeated.

I do not believe either in the mortgage area or in the core things that threaten the stability of the system it is fair to say that where those things were most acute, they were institutions that were under the Fed's supervision.

The independence of the Fed has served us well over time.

I really worry today if what we are seeing is kind of a dead cat bounce where all we are doing is pushing so much borrowed liquidity into our marketplace that we are just setting ourselves up for the next cliff.

I personally believe this represents a grossly inflated view of the Fed's expertise.

With decision-making authority dispersed to the Board and Reserve Banks, who will be accountable to Congress for the systemic risk regulation function as the 'system' cannot appear to testify right here before Congress?

Accountability at the Fed--Mr. Secretary, the Federal Reserve System was not designed to carry out the systemic risk oversight mission the administration proposes to give it.

I urge my colleagues to focus on creating a regulatory system for the next century, not one that merely seeks to remedy the mistakes of the last few years.

We must do everything we can to not only ensure the safety and soundness of our financial system, but also its competitive standing in the world.

I do not believe that we can reasonably expect the Fed or any other agency effectively play so many roles.