Political Quotes

“I want to thank Congressman King very much for coming to the floor because we share a concern that goes beyond party. This is so serious for our country, it's serious for our generation, it's serious for the next generation. If we look at the abuses of the financial system over the last 30 years, let's say, every time something bad happened, the government bailed them out. And then the next crisis was worse than the one before it. I came here during the 1980s. I saw what happened, and I saw a huge debt put on the American people, $140 billion at that point. And rather than strengthening the laws to prevent moral hazard, we loosen them. And then we got a worse crisis. If you look back to Enron, if you look back to everything that happened during the 1990s, rather than repairing it, what we did was we gave them more latitude--it's inexplicable what occurred--and the moral hazard got greater. And now with this, this is so much larger than the last two crises, and it's a real question as to whether the so-called ``reform'' coming out of the Congress will actually work. I would like to place in the Record an interview with Professor William Black, an attorney who was recently on television, that I think is very, very probing about the enormous potential here for financial fraud, control fraud, the lack of investigators inside the FBI, and as Congresswoman Speier mentioned, inside of the SEC. And then also an interview with Dr. Simon Johnson of MIT and Mr.…”