Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it is a pleasure to be here today with my friend the Senator from Tennessee to talk about legislation that we and eight--actually now nine of our colleagues--bipartisan legislation that has been recently introduced to reform our housing finance system. I came into office a couple of years later than the Senator from Tennessee, but I got here in January of 2009 when the entire future of our financial system was uncertain. We members of the Banking Committee rolled up our sleeves and tried to work together to prevent future crises. Well, history will determine whether we accomplished that goal. The Senator from Tennessee and I worked strongly together on a couple of titles of what has subsequently become known as the Dodd-Frank legislation. While there are problems in that legislation, while there are problems still within our financial system, I think no independent observer would not say that our financial system today, in 2013, is stronger than it was after the crisis. But one area that did not receive very much attention was the question of housing finance. We also know that in many ways our housing finance system, both from lack of underwriting, the process that then ended up allowing a lot of mortgages to get packaged off, securitized, with the assumption that there would never be a decline in housing prices or a significant decline in housing prices and that these securities would never be in jeopardy, in many ways led to part of that financial crisis.…”