Political Quotes

“it is observed that we are being asked to confirm a Treasury Secretary who helped bring about the 2008 financial crisis and profited off the misery that followed. During his campaign, President Trump promised to crack down on Wall Street abuses. In one of his campaign ads, the President said that the CEO of Goldman Sachs was part of a ``global elite'' that was ``robbing our working class.'' He said that on Wall Street, ``It's the powerful protecting only the powerful.'' Given his campaign promises, it is astounding that President Trump nominated Steve Mnuchin, someone whose business record embodies the worst abuses from the financial crisis, to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. In the fall of 2008, when I served in the U.S. House, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson came to Capitol Hill and painted a dire picture. He told us that without drastic intervention by Congress and the White House, the entire global financial system would collapse. The situation was so dire, he argued, that we could not even pause to provide additional, meaningful relief to the millions of families across the country facing home foreclosures. In the years that followed, we learned a lot more about just how bad things were. Many banks sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them, packaged those mortgages into complex financial instruments, colluded with ratings agencies, and sold those ``products'' as solid investments.…”