Political Quotes

“this is a pivotal point in the debate on Wall Street reform. We never want to see what happened to this country happen again, where they essentially crashed the stock market. People had been talked into very difficult to understand and exotic subprime mortgages. We had such greed running rampant on Wall Street, and instruments were created that were even difficult for the Secretary of the Treasury to explain--derivatives that were so complex they were in about the third order. If we were to adopt the Shelby amendment, we would weaken this bill. As a matter of fact, we will weaken current law, and not only will consumers be hurt but they will actually lose ground--when the purpose of the Dodd bill--our bill--is to elevate consumers, give them protection from these kinds of schemes that brought our economy to its knees and resulted in 700,000 jobs a month being lost then, and the wealth of the average American, who had even a 401(k), was down 20, 30, 40, and maybe 50 percent and, as a result of that, the lack of consumer confidence that followed. We know our economy is based on consumer confidence. Seventy percent of our economy is attached to consumer spending. When people see the stock market and their wealth going down, and see neighbors losing their homes and jobs, they feel threatened and they pull back, and rightly so. It started from deregulation on steroids on Wall Street, where the regulators didn't even use the powers they had to protect consumers.”