Jackie Speier

I have one question: What's it going to take? How many more oil spills do we have to endure before we're going to do something decisive about ending our reliance on oil? The amount of oil that has been spilled in the gulf since its…

I thank the gentleman from Florida for his passionate commitment to seniors. I'd like to address this whole issue of mortgages. You know, so many Americans have seen their homes being foreclosed on over the last 2 to 3 years. The numbers…

The Democratic Caucus feels very strongly that seniors in America count and, in so doing, created a Seniors Task Force cochaired ably by Congresswoman Schakowsky of Illinois and Congresswoman Matsui of California. And we thought it was…

I note that while there are 40 million Americans who are now 65, in 10 years that number will more than double to 88.5 million Americans who will be over the age of 65. So making sure that seniors are protected is going to be a more and…

I thank the gentlelady from Ohio. You know, it would be great for us to focus for just a minute on the prescription for Wall Street reform for the 40 million seniors in America and just kind of list out the protections that are in the Wall…

When you were referring to credit cards, I was reminded that, in 1980, a credit card application was one page long, about 700 words. Today, a credit card application--and, indeed, a contract--is closer to 30 pages. Imagine if senior…

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H. Res. 1073, a measure supporting the goals and ideals of RV Centennial Celebration Month. RVing is one of the great American traditions in travel. The 30 million Americans who regularly vacation via…

You know, the Army Corps of Engineers had a saying during World War II: ``The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.'' In 1993, President Clinton tried to do the impossible by lifting the decades-long ban on gay…

Thank you to my very good friend and colleague from California (Mr. Garamendi). You know, as you were talking about the shenanigans, what we heard last week from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was deeply troubling to…

As a side bet. As a side bet. So they stayed in this tower, but they took them out in a manner that allowed you to just bet for and against them, and as long as there was someone on the sell side and someone on the buy side, it was fine…

The interesting element of the subprime market was that those who were selling the product, the originators of the loans, weren't holding on to any of the instrument. They had no skin in the game. It was sold off to Wall Street, where they…

But imagine to allow these kinds of complex instrumentalities to be in the marketplace and not be regulated. That's what will be regulated as we move forward with financial reform. There will be a protection agency for consumers that will…

The interesting thing is the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which now on the Senate side is being billed as a bureau within the Fed, was really the brainchild of Professor Elizabeth Warren from Harvard Law School. And she likened it…

Well, interestingly enough, Goldman had purchased credit default swaps from AIG, and, of course, they were repaid in full by the taxpayers of this country, $12 billion worth, the highest recipient of money from those CDS's.

And you know who bought a lot of Abacus, who was on the other side of the trade with Paulson who shorted them, so who was buying Abacus? You won't be surprised to hear AIG, will you?

By being creative. This is what Goldman Sachs did, and it was really well-described in a book by Michael Lewis, called ``The Big Short,'' in which he writes: In the process, Goldman Sachs created a security so opaque and complex that it…

These were the mortgages that were then packaged and then sold to investors because, of course, they were grade A, and they would make them a lot of money. What happened here is they took this one tranche, and then they brought it over…

Well, this is what is kind of interesting about it. These are some of the Frankensteins that they were creating. Here is a tower, as they refer to it--the Soundview Home Loan Trust. If you look at the bottom there, at that little yellow…

I just want to show you one last chart. So this is the creativity of Goldman Sachs, creating these products, knowing they were bad, selling them off. And many of them were what are called synthetic CDOs. So they didn't actually have the…

If you ill-equip your very agencies to do the job, they won't be able to do the job. Between 2003 and 2007 under the Bush administration with Christopher Cox as the head of the SEC, you will not be surprised to know that there was an 80…

I think the American people are a bit confused as to what is really going on here. And, you know, it's a lot like the Humphrey Bogart movie: What's going on here is gambling, plain and simple. It would be one thing if these so-called…

When you speak to the term ``transparency,'' do you think that Goldman would have sold a dollar's worth of those synthetic collateralized debt obligations if people knew that their other client was shorting them and that 90 percent of them…

The hardest thing to try to explain to the American people is what is a synthetic CDO and liken it to what goes on in our lives. So I have been scratching my head trying to think of what it would be like. This may not be a good analogy…

I am joined this evening by a number of colleagues who are going to give us, I think, the reasons why financial reform is a must in this country. And the biggest poster child for why we have to do financial reform really is in Goldman…

You make the case for this great poster that shows the cracks in Wall Street. And back in 1996, the Federal Reserve reinterpreted the Glass-Steagall Act several times at the behest of Wall Street, eventually allowing bank holding companies…