On the recordMay 4, 2010
I thank the Senator from Delaware. It is so clear, first of all, that the Dodd bill is a huge step, a good step, a solid bill in reforming Wall Street. It is what we ought to do. There will be three or four major chances. One of them is the amendment Senator Kaufman and I are working on. There will be three or four major votes coming up to strengthen the bill. There will be efforts--particularly from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--to weaken the bill. There are clearly many people in this institution who want to do the work of Wall Street, and Wall Street has always been their benefactor. The big banks are their allies. They may do their bidding on the Senate floor. There will be efforts to strengthen the bill, such as Merkley-Levin, and some of the work we do with derivatives. Let me close and put a bit of a human face on this. This is technical stuff. When you look at these charts that we put up and what happened with the size of these banks--again, I cite this number that astounds me every time I think about it: Only 15 years ago, the largest 6 banks in the country had assets of 17 percent of GDP. Today, it is 63 percent of GDP--some $9 trillion. Those are astounding numbers.
