Political Quotes

“I rise to speak out against the nomination of Randal Quarles to be a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Mr. Quarles served in the Bush administration's Treasury Department in the years that led up to the financial crisis of 2008. His failure to take action to prevent this crisis led to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures and evictions in my home State of Nevada. Nevada was ground zero for the financial crisis. We were the hardest hit of any State in the country. We had the highest foreclosure rate for 62 months straight, and we had the highest number of underwater mortgages. Banks took the homes of more than 219,000 Nevada families. Anyone driving through parts of Las Vegas and Reno in 2009 could see boarded-up houses, ``for sale'' signs, and empty lots everywhere. On many streets, you would see more houses in foreclosure than not. I was attorney general in Nevada at this time. My team and I did everything we could to fight for homeowners and help them save their homes. We sued the big banks and secured $1.9 billion to create the Home Again: Nevada Homeowner Relief Program to help Nevadans stay in their homes. As all of this was going on, I knew there was only so much we could do at the State level. We needed real change at the Federal level to prevent the financial crisis from ever happening again. The Federal regulators should have protected Nevada homeowners, but instead they protected the big banks.…”