Bob Corker: “I rise to speak about an amendment I had earlier today. It was a commonsense amendment that I think gets at the heart of…”

“I rise to speak about an amendment I had earlier today. It was a commonsense amendment that I think gets at the heart of this financial crisis. It didn't pass, but the amendment was to put in place underwriting standards to keep the kind of crisis we just saw happen in our country over the last couple of years from happening again. I think we all realize the base of this crisis, which the Dodd bill does not address, was the fact that we had large numbers of loans written around this country that people couldn't pay back. The underwriting standards were poor. Credit was extended to people who couldn't pay the mortgages back. Those mortgages were passed throughout the world, and then we had $600 trillion worth of notional value derivatives that were based on, again, these underlying bad mortgages. Then we had a systemic crisis not only in this country but around the world. So what I attempted to do with my amendment was to put some appropriate underwriting standards in place where everybody who purchased a home would need to have a 5-percent downpayment.”