Political Quotes

“It really does, if I might take a moment here. You raised one of the very important points. I know later in this discussion you're going to take this up in much more detail. But it's very, very clear that the financial sector, in their rush for profit, created the housing bubble. Didn't do it all by themselves. There was plenty of greed on the part of certain people that bought houses, and the real estate community was involved in that, the mortgage community. But here we are after bailing out Wall Street. What is Wall Street doing to bail out Main Street? Not much. I heard a discussion earlier today from a banker that said, Oh, we're making all kinds of SBA loans. Yes, that's guaranteed. Those are loans guaranteed by the Federal Government. But what risks are they taking? We passed the Dodd-Frank language, which was designed to rein in Wall Street. Good. Very good. As strong as I would like? No. I would go back and put in place the Glass-Steagall Act. I was the insurance commissioner before the Glass-Steagall Act disappeared, and insurance was over here and banks were over there and investment banking was separate. So that the kind of problem that existed in 2000 where the banks went berserk and crazy in greed creating all of these CDOs and other kinds of really fake instruments, they couldn't do it. But nonetheless, the Dodd-Frank is there. Our Republican colleagues are refusing to fund the implementation of that program, putting all of us at risk once again.…”