Political Quotes

“It is out there. I thank my colleague. I want to take a minute or two to have us step back and think about how we got into this mess with the housing bubble and all that literally led us almost to the brink of disaster in this country. Part of what happened is market forces were not allowed to work. Regulation was not enforced. The regulators were in many cases, too many cases, asleep at the switch. But I will talk a little bit about the housing markets. I am a guy, as a Governor and as a Senator, I always pushed real hard--and as a Congressman before that--pushed real hard for home ownership. I love the idea that people own their own home, own a piece of the rock. For a lot of people the biggest part of their life savings is the home they own. They use that not just as shelter but to help send kids to school and borrow against for all kinds of things and at the end of their lives to live off of, in some cases, the equity in their homes. That is a good thing. That is not to say everybody ought to be a homeowner. In some cases there are some folks who ought not to be. As the housing market heated up and the housing prices were going up, folks assumed they would go up forever. They didn't. Few things go up forever, and that includes housing prices. We had a number of folks looking around at other people who wanted to become home owners.…”