John W. Olver: “The amendment is not a modest one by any means. It is a double ax taken to the legislation that is involved. It takes…”

“The amendment is not a modest one by any means. It is a double ax taken to the legislation that is involved. It takes $18 billion out of only the discretionary amount of funding that is provided in the underlying bill. As such, that is between 20 and 25 percent of the reduction in all of the discretionary accounts from the underlying bill. Who would have ever thought that we would have gotten so deep in deregulation and had our major financial services regulating agencies so asleep at the switch that we would have ended up in a housing crisis, a foreclosure crisis, that has been raging to the point where there are 6 or 8 million foreclosed homes? It almost brought, not only the American financial system to its knees, but almost the whole world's financial system to its knees. It ended up with the Secretary of the Treasury, under the administration of the previous President, coming to Congress and asking for us--begging us, begging the Congress--to bail out the biggest banks in this country, the banks which caused the housing crisis by running a casino on Wall Street. In that process, by that time, by the time they came to Congress to ask for that bailout, we were already four quarters into a recession in this country, a recession that raged throughout the whole of the year of 2008 and on into at least the first two quarters of 2009. We have begun to come back out of that recession.…”