Richard Shelby

I don't think we can give the power to override fully public bodies charged with issues like investor protection to the Fed.

I have never advocated that.

If you have got bad people sitting on the top of each of those peaks, it is not going to matter what you legislate here.

The bottom line here is much of this could have been prevented without a single additional piece of legislation being done if people had just done their jobs back here.

I could not agree more with you.

I would say it is more important to hit this target.

This crisis is the result of what may have been the greatest regulatory failure in human history.

The unregulated credit derivatives market contributed to the largest quarterly loss in history.

I do not think, however, that the answer, Senator is creating a new agency that only looks at products, because those products arise and exist in the context of a larger marketplace, and they need to be understood in that context.

It would be a very bad idea to name who is systemically significant.

It would send certainty to the market, would it not?

It was not so much the failure of a regulatory system, although things need to be fixed, as it was a failure of regulators to act.

Some of these banks should be closed. Will they cost money to close? Will they send shock waves through the system? Absolutely. But if you keep subsidizing banks, when do you stop? Close them down. Get them out of business. If they're…

Are you telling us and the American people that you believe that the Government, the taxpayers is going to recoup their money they have invested or they have loaned or given or whatever to AIG, billions and billions of dollars? Are you…

Well, I hope you are right, but I believe you are totally wrong.

I am not ungrateful for what the Fed did because it permitted us to untangle this.

AIG insurers got the upside. The taxpayers got the downside.

The Fed and Treasury can be secretive for a while, but not forever.

Your answer might be the Fed answer, but it is not going to be the answer we are going to accept, and the American people aren't going to accept.

I also hope that today's hearing will shed new light on the origins of our financial crisis as well as inform our upcoming discussions on financial regulatory reform.

Given the taxpayers' dollars at stake and the impact on our financial system, this Committee has an obligation to thoroughly examine the reasons for AIG's collapse.

If the American taxpayers' money is at stake, and it is, big time, I believe the American taxpayers and people in this Committee, we need to know who benefited, where this money went.

The collapse of the American International Group is the largest corporate failure in American history.

The Fed is the central bank, supposed to be the lender of last resort. Now it has become the lender of first resort, it seems to me.

I hope we will not rush to consolidate all the bank regulatory systems. But I do believe that we need to go down that road and we need to do it right.