On the recordNovember 3, 2011
I would like to thank my friend from North Carolina for bringing this bill forward. It is a good idea. It allows for investments to be made in smaller amounts by more people using mass kinds of solicitations through the Internet, through some other vehicle that we may not know of at this point. And that is a good step. And as we've gone through the process, we've built it into a better bill by adding in investor protections because this is something where people could be misled. There could be misrepresentations, and there has to be some penalty for that. As the amendment process goes forward today, we will build those amendments into this. Now, having said all of that, having listened to the description of the bill that preceded us about making it easier to sell securities, sell investments, sell deals to accredited investors, that's a nice step, too. Again, we need to have investor protection restrictions in there just to make sure people don't get defrauded. We just suffered through that in 2008 with the likes of Madoff and Stanford and a number of other fraudsters, con artists. We want to minimize that if we can as we try to make capital available to businesses to grow. Now, let's not make any mistake here. These are nice steps, but they're not going to put a lot of people back to work. My friend, Mr.…
