Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I am not an attorney and I will not stand in the well and say that I understand everything about derivatives, either, even having served the last 2 years on the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs. But what I do know is that the more you know about them, the more you have to be a little bit leery about how they are handled. They are extremely complicated and they are dangerous financial products. Even some very sophisticated investors do not understand derivatives completely. Their value is derived from the value of other assets, other instruments, other indices, and they are frequently traded over the counter in very highly leveraged transactions. At this time really no one can make a reasonable prediction of the potential losses that institutional holders, including many public entities, face from the derivatives. The one chart that the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Dingell] was pointing to showed how many municipalities, how many counties across this Nation, and those are just the ones we know about, may risk some sort of danger and some taxpayers' dollars. I will be offering an amendment very soon to try to deal with that. But this scantily regulated market is thought to be rife with fraud and abuse.”