Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his leadership on this issue, and I thank my colleagues who are going to join us later. I am joining them in urging all of our colleagues in the Senate not to roll back the protections that are in place due to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Let me remind everyone where we have come from. When we passed the Wall Street reform act, the Dodd-Frank act, we were in the most painful financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Dow Jones dropped from roughly 13,700 points in July of 2007 to 7,235 points by March of 2009, about a 47 percent drop in wealth as indicated by the stock market. It was a huge, huge hit. The line at that time was: What is happening to your 401(k) plan? Well, we have come back, and one of the reasons we have come back is because Dodd-Frank has now provided safer rules of the road for financial institutions. Back then and going forward, we lost 8.6 million jobs from January of 2008 until January of 2010. There were 8 million jobs lost primarily because Wall Street lost its way, frankly. The unemployment rate doubled from 5 percent in January of 2008 to 10 percent in October of 2009. In that period of time, roughly from July 2007 to November of 2014, nearly 7.5 million families lost their homes. These are sobering numbers. Behind each of these numbers is an individual or family--our constituents, who suffered real and serious damages.…”