Pete Sessions: “I am thankful Senator Corker is with us. He has involved himself in these matters. He said something I truly believe…”

“I am thankful Senator Corker is with us. He has involved himself in these matters. He said something I truly believe: that we have not been told what the problem is and what kind of plan really exists to fix the problem. That is the difficulty we are facing. We have not had that kind of honest assessment from President Bush's administration, and we have not had it under President-elect Obama's administration. I think a lot of that is because they do not know, and a lot of it is because they are things that cannot readily be fixed. The credit problem is the No. 1 problem. Some people say that the economy is like this big interstate, and the problem we had last October was 18-wheelers blocking the interstate, and if we could just get that aside and open the free markets again, everything would be OK. But that was not the problem. The problem was, as Senator Corker indicates, much bigger than that. Fundamentally, there was a housing bubble, fueled by Government-sponsored programs and low-interest rates and a lack of discipline with respect to lenders and the sale of mortgage-backed assets. And this lack of discipline sort of hid the danger in those transactions. That was the problem. So when these houses started adjusting downward in value, because they were too high--how many people did you know who could not afford a house? They were going up two and three times the rate of inflation, two and three times the increase in gross domestic product.”