On the recordJune 9, 2010
And how we got here was we met in rooms around this Capitol for a number of weeks, 2 or 3 weeks, as I recall. And the President of the United States, George W. Bush, in his last year of presidency, or in the last several years of his presidency, indicated that his Secretary of Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve were his designees to work with Congress to see what we could do to prevent the potential meltdown or catastrophe to the world's economy. And we went to work to do that. Now, as I recall--and I sat in some of those meetings, not all of those meetings--we would periodically tune the conference telephone to economists, Nobel Prize-winning economists around the world, of all political persuasions and philosophical positions. And, to my best recollection, there were several dozen. And to a man, or woman, not one of them disagreed that what we were facing was total meltdown and that precipitous action had to be taken.
