Political Quotes

“And Members, I think that my colleague from Minnesota said it all: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of the American taxpayers who trusted us to regulate this industry that had responsibility for these mortgages? Are you on the side of taxpayers who simply wanted to live the American Dream, who simply wanted to get into a mortgage so that they could own a home and do what it is the American Dream says we can do and we can accomplish? They trusted us to make sure that our regulators did their job. We all let them down. We allowed these mortgage firms, these loan initiators, these big banks to create these exotic products, products we had never heard of before. Nobody questioned what was a no doc loan. Nobody asked what is this teaser loan. Nobody talked about what happens when these loans reset. And the American taxpayer was confronted with a mortgage with 30, 40 pieces of paper and they signed on the dotted line, because they wanted to live the American Dream. Little did they know that they would not be able to meet the reset amount, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years from now; and so they got caught up in the scheme. It was a huge, fraudulent scheme perpetrated on the American people by major financial institutions. Americans didn't decide all of a sudden that they didn't want to pay their bills, that they didn't want to pay their mortgage. Something big happened.…”