Political Quotes

“I thank the Speaker. Let me rephrase this. At the hearing, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Jill Sommers' testimony was invaluable to the public. Her testimony places the MF Global collapse in proper perspective, and I'm quoting directly. She said: ``Lehman Brothers and Refco are the two most recent futures commission merchant bankruptcies. While the Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy was monumental in scale and the Refco bankruptcy involved serious fraud at the parent company, commodity customers did not lose their money at either firm. In both instances, commodity customer accounts were wholly intact; that is they contained all open positions and all associated segregated collateral. That being the case, customer accounts were promptly transferred to healthy FCMs''--or futures commission merchants--``with the commodity customers having no further involvement in the bankruptcy proceeding. Unfortunately, that is not what happened at MF Global because customer accounts were not intact.'' The fact that ``customer accounts were not intact,'' as Commissioner Sommers described it, means that someone took other people's money. I believe most of us would call that theft. Even if some of the money is recovered by the bankruptcy process, that does not alter the fact that the process by which customer accounts were violated broke the law. It is an understatement to say that many American families and businesses lost important investments.…”