Political Quotes

“First of all, let me just say regarding the Merkley-Klobuchar amendment to the Corker--not amendment to it, but the side-by-side--I wish to thank Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe of Maine for cosponsoring that amendment on the underwriting standards. I appreciate that very much. Let me say to both of my colleagues, Senator Hutchison and Senator Klobuchar, as my colleagues know, I started out many months ago with the idea of trying to come down to a single prudential regulator as one of the reforms in this bill. One of my concerns, as my colleagues know, was we had some nine agencies. It was an alphabet soup out there with a lot of overlap in terms of actually who is responsible, who is going to be accountable for things that occur. Obviously, we want to have a dual banking system, the State banks and so forth, that don't want to be drawn into a Federal system unnecessarily. So it began to break down from a single prudential regulator to maybe two. I say this with great respect, but I would point out that the Federal Reserve Board, of course, never implemented the requirements on mortgage lending that passed in 1994. A lot of the major financial institutions were basically unregulated institutions. My concern has been that the Fed did not exactly live up to its reputation during this period of time and contributed in major ways to the problems we are in today.”