Political Quotes

“Mr. President, before I speak on this amendment, I want to applaud my colleague from Connecticut who spoke so passionately and knowledgeably about the challenge that had been faced by subprime underwriting gone astray. If only the letters that he and his colleagues wrote in 2006 and in 2007, those multiple appeals, if only those who had the power to establish those underwriting standards had been listened to, had been followed up on, then we would have a much smaller challenge today. We would not have had this big meltdown in 2008 and 2009, with so many millions of American families having the value of their home destroyed. I applaud him for his advocacy year after year after year. I am pleased to be able to join him in this effort now. I particularly applaud the efforts to establish standards for skin in the game. This is a very responsible way to create accountability for our mortgage originators. I do want to note that there are three issues that particularly contributed to dysfunction at the retail mortgage level. The first is liar loans, undocumented income, where a mortgage originator would tell the client: Well, we will just pencil in here that you earn $150,000. It does not matter. Don't you worry about what you are earning. We will put this in here. That obviously led to a complete corruption of the quality of the mortgage. Certainly the families involved had no prospect of paying for those mortgages and the interest rates they were being signed up for.…”