On the recordMay 12, 2010
I appreciate the leadership of my colleague from Delaware who understands this Wall Street reform perhaps better than anybody in the Senate, and has particularly led the charge on working on too big to fail meaning too big. That the size of banks in this country--when the six largest banks' assets 15 years ago were only 17 percent of GDP, and today the assets of the six largest banks total 63 percent of gross domestic product, we know that too big to fail really is too big. I appreciate the work Senator Kaufman has done on that. We know what a financial meltdown looks like. It means pensions shattered, it means homes lost, it means college plans delayed or even abandoned, it means good-paying jobs lost, it means middle-class security undermined. Two years after the financial collapse in March 2010, there were 655,000 unemployed Ohioans. Ohio's unemployment rate today is 11 percent. Three of the largest banks slashed their SBA lending by 86 percent from 2008 to 2009. In Ohio, small business SBA-backed loans went from 4,200 of them in 2007 to 2,100 of them in 2009. Wall Street's casino gambling with the housing markets has caused nearly 90,000 foreclosures in Ohio just in the year 2009. The average median sales price of existing single-family homes across eight of Ohio's metropolitan markets plunged by an average of 16 percent from 2007 to 2009.
