Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, numerous stories have come out over the last few weeks, all detailing the corruption and outright fraud on Wall Street. First, there was the recent news about former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson's inappropriately tipping off a few key friends from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street tycoons about the impending collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that those friends could hedge and make money on that insider knowledge. Then a judge in New York threw out one of the orchestrated settlements between Citigroup, which was a bank at the center of the wrongdoing, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which allowed that bank to walk away from cases of fraud without admitting any wrongdoing. This past weekend, ``60 Minutes'' interviewed a former executive vice president at Countrywide Financial, a giant and duplicitous player in the U.S. mortgage business. This woman was in charge of fraud investigations at the company before the financial crisis. According to her, ``Countrywide loan officers were forging and manipulating borrowers' income and asset statements to help them get loans they weren't qualified for and couldn't afford.'' She went on to say that all of the recycle bins, wherever they looked in that company, were full of signatures that had been cut off of one document and put onto another and then photocopied or faxed.…”