Political Quotes

“I yield a few minutes, if I could, to the Senator from Florida. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida. Mr. LeMIEUX. Mr. President, I wish to congratulate my colleague from Tennessee on his amendment, and I rise in support of it. In Florida, we know this was the very problem that started this whole crisis. We called them NINJO loans--no income, no job. Underwriting standards went out the window because of the hunger of Wall Street to suck up these mortgages, to bundle them into these large securitized packages and then sell them off. So as Wall Street demanded more and more, underwriting went out the window. And what does the bank or the mortgage broker care if they can just ship off their mortgage and sell it off to Wall Street? What do they care if the person they are giving the mortgage to can't pay it back? What do they care if that person can't afford the home to start with? So we got ourselves into this perfect storm of a situation, and one of the key elements that allowed this to happen was the fact that there weren't underwriting standards. When I bought my first home back in 1995, I didn't have 20 percent to put down; I had 15 percent. So I had to get mortgage insurance to cover the other 5 percent of my downpayment. Until such time as my family--my wife and I at the time, before we had any of our kids--could make a payoff to get the 20 percent of equity value to the loan, we had to pay for the mortgage insurance.…”