On the recordFebruary 10, 2011
Mr. Speaker, I come after a couple of members of the Financial Services Committee with whom I like to work and I admire; but I've got to say, what's being proposed here today is that America forget what happened on Wall Street 2 years ago, 4 years ago, 6 years ago. It's a request to have collective amnesia and forget that giant Ponzi schemes were perpetrated on hundreds of thousands of people. Pension funds, firefighter funds, people all across this country. Let's just start with one guy named Madoff. The reason you have regulations, the reason you want a regulatory body is to stop crooks like Bernie Madoff. And under the Republican watch, it was, Let's not regulate. Let's not enforce regulations. Let's allow the market to regulate and police itself. And then we have a guy like Bernie Madoff. I heard Mr. Bachus talk about a company that, because of regulations, won't invest $1 billion. Well, regulations and the lack of regulations under the Bush administration cost investors $65 billion in the Madoff Ponzi scheme alone. Forget about Stanford and the other ones where these bandits were running rampant. Our economy expects regulation. It requires regulation so people aren't defrauded and looted. And it's this kind of oversight where we make sure the regulators are doing their job to look out for crooks who are stealing people's money. That's their job.
