Michael Bennet

Every weekend when I go home to Colorado, what I hear from small businesses is they have no access to capital, no access to credit.

I think you described it as temporary targeted programs--might be necessary to get our small businesses access to the credit that they need.

Congratulations on assuming the chairmanship.

It is my pleasure today to introduce Harris Sherman and speak in support of his nomination.

I think both the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary have been doing good work trying to get us out of here.

I hope that whatever it is we arrive at here and whatever we do, the Administration leads toward a bias that when firms need to fail, they fail.

I think we have just seen 20 years of leverage piling up on our system and lack of attention to that that has led to the destruction of... our economy.

I think this is fraught with incredible amounts of potential unintended consequences, and we need to be enormously careful.

We are going to see companies that can make anhydrous ammonia out of corncobs and reduce our reliance on petroleum.

The innovation history of agriculture is one of America's success stories, and I think with this we will see a continuation of that.

From my perspective anyway, if we are going to be able to assure that another generation of Coloradans are able to farm or one after that, we need some answer to this question on how to reserve our water resources.

I would argue that what we are seeing is one of the most significant, if not the most significant, investment in new opportunities in rural America that we have seen in a long, long time.

I hope as you bring these servicers in and you will look at which servicers are actually acting in good faith and which are not.

We have got to get this out sooner, quicker, faster, more expeditiously.

I would like to join the Chairman in saying, if there are things that we haven't done, let us know what those things are because this housing issue is a fundamental issue for our families and also our economic recovery depends on our…

I just would underscore what you have heard today, which is that the visibility and the urgency with which the issues in New York and Wall Street were addressed needs to not come in first in this race of urgency, because our homeowners are…

I candidly believe that we have a potential flood of foreclosures waiting in the wings.

I have exhausted my savings, had to disburse my 401(k) to pay bills and attempt to save my house.

I am wondering, as this gets ramped up, whether there is some way we can work with lenders to forestall some of these foreclosures.

I think it is a very good reminder that we need to be very careful about how we think about our financial institutions in this country because they are not all the same and not all of them contributed to the situation that we now find…

With respect to 'too-big-to-fail,' which people have talked about, from the point of view of the people living in Northeast Colorado who lost what to many people would seem was a very small bank, that bank was too big to fail for them.

But only the ones that deserve to fail should be the ones that fail, and if there are viable banks...

It would seem to me--that is an interesting point, Mr. Johnson, on the criteria question...

The American people are so tired of having us look in the rearview mirror and say what happened while there is all this carnage out there.

I completely agree with that, and I think that as we proceed here with this and much of the other regulation that we are talking about, we need to be very careful that we aren't creating perverse incentives that end up doing more harm than…