Political Quotes

“That is exactly right, and I very much appreciate you putting that form up there, Cracks in Wall Street. It's a very interesting presentation and a very accurate presentation of the set of circumstances that were put into play over that period of time beginning in 1996 with this Congress here trying to manipulate the situation. I remember how many of us fought against those things. We fought against them. We voted against them. And, of course, we voted against that elimination of that Glass-Steagall Act because we understood very clearly that the elimination of investments, by allowing investment banks to work closely together with commercial banks and take issues like mortgages and manipulate the mortgages into subprime mortgages, and sell mortgages to people who were not able to afford them, and to continue to manipulate that mortgage system and to include that mortgage system into large investment packages, and those large investment packages which were weak and really didn't deserve nearly the kind of attention or the funding that they received were successful based upon--largely based upon, at least, the fact that they had mortgages within them. And people had the idea that, Well, mortgages are secure. Anyone who has a mortgage is going to pay that mortgage off. Hardly anybody misses their mortgage payment.”