The statistics are really frightening in what has happened with Wall Street. If you take a look, what is really happening is Wall Street is not making loans, and many of the small banks, the community banks, don't have the capital to make…

So on the buy side, they would be giving information that was inaccurate, that Standard & Poor's, the rating industries of the world would go out and use some, I don't know, gimmick to re-rate this tranche, this piece of that tower…

So ultimately we wound up with a situation in which the financial industry had set up a scheme to sell mortgages to people who couldn't possibly pay those mortgages over time. They were often sold with teaser rates, low interest rates for…

And part of that Consumer Protection Agency focuses directly on the mortgage market out there and deals with those mortgage companies that were selling subprime mortgage opportunities to people that had really no ability to pay it back. So…

I know that the two of you both on the Financial Services Committee spent most of last year, 2009, working on a major reform that actually passed the House in December. Now, I had the good fortune of being elected in November, arriving…

I think that book is misnamed, ``The Great Short.'' I think probably ``The Great Fraud'' would be a better name for the whole thing.

Now, when AIG got that money from the taxpayers in the TARP bailout, the Wall Street bailout, what did they do with that money? Did they give it to the homeowner that was going to lose their home, or did they give it to Goldman?

So what Goldman Sachs was doing was essentially a very dishonest, disreputable, and quite possibly fraudulent scheme to rip off some investors somewhere. They may have been sophisticated, they may not have. But they were told that this was…

So, this was the packaging of the mortgages that were being sold to people who couldn't afford to pay their mortgages?

Is that the creativity that Goldman Sachs so prided itself on, creating something that was unpriceable, that nobody could figure out what it was and, therefore, it could not price it? But what did they do with this Frankenstein that was…

Madam Speaker, tonight, it is really important that America comes to understand how the great collapse of 2008 occurred and what its impact has been. I think they have a pretty good idea as to what the impact is. We see it back home. We…

Well, there certainly ought to be a law. And we're going to spend a few moments talking about the law. But first I would like to turn to our colleague from the great State of Ohio. Please.