Chris Dodd

Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this important hearing today. General Eikenberry, congratulations on your nomination, and thank you for your tremendous service to our Nation.

What we need is a comprehensive strategy that will enable us to quickly withdraw American forces in the most responsible way possible.

I would hope that the administration's Iraq strategy would put the Iraqi people front and center.

The return to sectarian violence is the great fear, here, and if you end up short-changing the funding, the very organizations that have been a part of the solution, here, become part of an ongoing problem.

We need to more vigorously and dynamically engage with the Iraqi Government to help them build the capacity and the skills to deliver for the needs of their own people.

The obvious question that others have raised is, at some point we're going to have to stop funding these Awakening Councils, and the danger, obviously, that these very groups that now are part of the solution, could become part of the…

The purpose of the surge was to provide breathing space for Iraqis to engage in political reconciliation.

I can also promise you rating agencies are going to be very much a part of our overall effort.

It would be a mistake to paint every financial institution with the same broad brush.

We are going to again explore ways in which we will try to modernize and improve bank regulation and supervision.

I'm disappointed, frankly, that those who requested this kind of a change didn't have the courage to stand up a couple of days ago and admit that they were the ones that asked for it.

I think that should be preserved.

With all due respect, this is the problem. In a sense, we talk about too big to fail in the sense of private institutions.

I have said over and over again I am sort of agnostic on all of this. I want to do what works.

It seems to me you get, like in the thrift crisis years ago, the regulator becomes also the one that also deals with these resolutions.

I get uneasy about the fact that the Fed is the lender of last resort.

I do not think you can get away by suggesting--I say this respectfully to you--that because they have not been held at the institution...

Just following up on the Senator's question, how many of those banks did you find that violated your guidelines?

We have got to figure out a new direction--that can't go on, in my view.

A year ago, this Committee heard from witnesses on two separate occasions that the banking system was sound.

Doesn't that lend itself to shopping again here?

We are going to want to have as many conversations as we can with you as we move forward on how to develop these ideas.

We do not have a table big enough.

There were hundreds of thousands of bad loans. Hundreds of thousands of them.

But shouldn't that have raised a red flag? You are the experts in this area, and you were watching people get loans with no documentation, these liar loans and so forth. Was anyone watching?