Political Quotes

“Mr. President, a year and a half ago, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began a review of the causes of the financial crisis. The subcommittee, which I chair, sought to answer a fundamental question about a crisis that was, at that moment, threatening to bring on a second Great Depression, and that has cost millions of Americans their jobs, their homes, their businesses and their savings. The question we sought to answer: How did this happen? And we asked that question so that we could inform our colleagues and the public on steps we might take to protect ourselves from the danger of future crises. The subcommittee examined millions of pages of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and conducted four hearings with more than 30 hours of testimony. What we learned was sobering: We learned that mortgage lenders such as Washington Mutual Bank sought to boost their short-term profits by making increasingly risky mortgage loans to borrowers increasingly unlikely to be able to repay them. WaMu, as it was known, made hundreds of billions of dollars of loans, many of which were laced with fraudulent borrower information, and then packaged and sold these loans, dumping toxic assets into the financial system like a polluter dumping poison into a river.…”