Political Quotes

“But this is not a case of just one bad company. We, unfortunately, had a culture all across Wall Street that allowed things like this to happen. And recently I asked Chairman Frank if we could take a look at some of the practices of Lehman Brothers. And we did. We had a hearing on Lehman Brothers. We both participated in that hearing. Because Lehman Brothers gambled with the hard-earned money, the pension funds of countless Americans. Certainly people from Ohio, people from California's pensions, people from Colorado's pensions had been invested in Lehman products, and Lehman Brothers did not tell those investors or other investors that they were so over-leveraged that their financial picture was pretty bleak. Instead, they tried to disguise what was really going on at Lehman by this tricky accounting practice where they moved some of the problems off the balance sheet at the time when their quarterly report was due. If you look at the quarterly report, you would not get the real story from Lehman because of this practice called Repo 105. They did this very deliberately.”