Wendy Sherman: “I support the committee system. The Democratic Caucus has put roughly 25 of its members on the Financial Services…”

“I support the committee system. The Democratic Caucus has put roughly 25 of its members on the Financial Services Committee. We are the members of the Democratic Caucus assigned to study and debate legislation on Financial Services issues. We did just that. And 60 percent of the Democrats assigned to the Financial Services Committee, 15 Democrats, voted in favor of this bill, while 10 opposed it. So if members of our caucus wonder what would our caucus position be if all the members of our caucus had a chance to really analyze bills in this particular technical area, one would expect that 60 percent of our caucus would support this legislation. The reason for that is that the purpose of regulation is to reduce risk rather than having risk be the reason to have regulation. This bill focuses on getting companies to reduce their risk. There are those that say if we just designate more companies as SIFIs, we will get more regulation. No, you won't. What you get is more companies designated, but then you get pressure to have less regulation on all the designated companies. What we need is to reserve the SIFI designation for those who are clearly exposing our economy to the risk of another meltdown, and we need to encourage companies to be less of a risk to our economy. The ranking member, who is bearing a substantial oratorical challenge, being, I think, the only speaker opposing the bill, correctly points out that AIG was a risk to our economy. That is right.…”