Political Quotes

“The chairman can be assured that since my team was one and done, I will skip the bracket discussion here. Mr. Speaker, I want to start by thanking the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Poliquin) for his work on this very reasonable legislation. Stress tests are a good idea that should be standard practice in any company. What is not a good idea--and, quite frankly, not terribly helpful in promoting systemic financial stability--is the cryptic and arbitrary manner in which stress tests are handled today. Today, the Federal Reserve imposes these stress tests on all financial firms with more than $10 billion in consolidated assets. This doesn't apply just to banks, despite the fact that the Fed is a bank regulator. This requirement to submit information extends to nonbank financial firms as well. Mr. Speaker, let me take a moment to walk you through what one of these stress tests looks like. A financial firm is given cryptic instructions to run a number of scenarios to test the fortitude of the institution. That firm then submits tens of thousands of pages to the Fed. In some cases, that number can climb to more than 100,000 pages at a cost of millions of dollars. Mr. Speaker, to give you an idea of what 20,000 pages is, in our committee hearing, we had a visual aid there with a table about this size right here in front of me today, about 3 feet tall, and boxes all around. That is 20,000 pages. Some of these stress tests, Mr.…”