On the recordJune 30, 2010
This bill has good in it. It really does. It has enhanced consumer protection similar to what the Federal Reserve has enacted. It has greater transparency and disclosure. In the field of derivatives, it has provisions to prevent companies like British Petroleum from manipulating the market, as they did last year. But there's a lot of bad in this bill, and there's a lot of ugly. I'm going to talk about the bad when I address the bill. And the bad is some capital requirements on companies that could cost a trillion dollars. And that's a greater amount than the two stimuluses put together. That could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. But right now I want to talk about the ugly. And the ugly is the bailout of creditors and counterparties. This is a Wall Street bailout bill, make no mistake about it. This bill says that the FDIC can lend to a failing company. Now this is a company that is failing. They can't meet their obligations. You loan a failing company money. You can purchase the assets. This is the government purchasing the assets of the largest financial companies in America. They can take a security interest in the assets. They can guarantee the obligations of the firm. We did that with Fannie and Freddie. We told the Chinese bondholders, We'll pay you a hundred cents on the dollar. And with AIG we did the same thing. We told the European banks, we told Goldman and Morgan, We'll pay these credit swaps off at a hundred percent. They can do that under this bill.
