Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise to address the amendment on crowdfunding that we will be considering shortly on the floor of the Senate. Specifically, the goal is to create a solid foundation for success of enabling Americans to invest in startup companies, invest in small companies through the Internet, and to do so in a fashion that does not result in predatory scams but results in capital formation that helps small business thrive across our Nation. The House bill, as it came over to us, has crowdfunding provisions that are simply a pathway to predatory scams, a paved highway to predatory scams. What do I mean by that? They say basically that a company seeking to raise investment capital doesn't have to give any financial information of any kind about their company. If they do provide information, they don't have to have accountability for the accuracy of that information. By the way, they can hire people to pump their stock, and that is OK under the law. In other words, everything we associate with the worst boiler rooms, the worst pump-and-dump schemes, is made legal by the House legislation. That is why we need to fix this on the floor of the Senate. We lay out a provision that says, if you raise less than $100,000, you as the CEO assert the accuracy of the information you are putting out--simple financial statements. If you raise a larger amount of funds, you proceed to have an accountant-reviewed statement that you can vouch for.…”