Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise to speak to amendment No. 428 on the regulation of mortgage servicing. We spend a lot of time in Washington talking about many topics but often not getting to the issue most important to American citizens; that is, getting them back to work, creating jobs. Creating jobs should be the paramount concern of every person in this town. We are not going to get job growth going again until we deal with the housing crisis that started this recession and that is blocking our recovery. Three years ago, our economy was nearly destroyed by a combination of high-risk, high-cost subprime mortgages and reckless bets on Wall Street. Since then we fixed many of those problems in subprime mortgages. We have ended three of the key predatory practices. One of those was undocumented loans, otherwise known, commonly, as ``liar loans,'' where the information was fictionalized. Then we had the prepayment penalty. It was a steel trap in which a mortgage document would lock people into a loan with an exploding interest rate and would prevent them from being able to get out of that loan. We knew from a Wall Street Journal study that 60 percent of the families in these predatory loans with the steel trap prepayment penalties qualified for regular, ordinary, fully amortizing 30-year prime loans.…”