Political Quotes

“I am delighted to be joined today by my colleagues, Mike Johanns and Sherrod Brown, in introducing the Insurance Capital Standards Clarification Act of 2014. We are pleased to be joined by Senators Kirk and Tester as cosponsors. This legislation clarifies the Federal Reserve's authority to recognize the distinctions between banking and insurance when implementing section 171 of the Dodd-Frank Act, commonly referred to as the ``Collins Amendment'' since I wrote this provision of the law. Before I describe our bill in detail, I would like to provide some background on section 171 and why it is so important that nothing be done to diminish or weaken it. We all recall the circumstances we faced 4 years ago, as our Nation was emerging from the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. That crisis had many causes, but among the most important was the fact that some of our nation's largest financial institutions were dangerously undercapitalized, while at the same time, they held interconnected assets and liabilities that could not be disentangled in the midst of a crisis. The failure of these over-leveraged financial institutions threatened to bring the American economy to its knees. As a consequence, the federal government was forced to step in to prop-up financial institutions that were considered ``too big to fail.'' Little has angered the American public more than these taxpayer-funded bailouts.…”