Mark Warner

Mr. Chairman, I am happy to be on the Committee. I do not know if this shows that I drew the long straw or the short straw, but I am happy to be here.

As a new member of the committee and of the Senate, and if you have two minutes to kill, can you give us a little quickie overview of--I think I understand the jurisdiction of the Committee, but if you could explain it again and what you…

They have risk, and hopefully we are going to, at the end of the day, come out relatively close to whole.

Too many folks still do not know that--at least Virginians feel that we have totally wasted all that first $350 billion.

It is not a prerequisite to finish the stress test before you----

A pricing mechanism, basically.

The sooner we bite this bullet, the better in terms of trying to get some of these--particularly clean up the balance sheets and get these bad assets off.

I want to come back to this valuation issue, but I have got a couple of other questions first.

I want to hear the testimony, as well, and get to the questions. I am just going to give you a heads up. I am going to come back to you on issues around transparency.

So actually making a risk assessment of the product, and then if the assessment was the product was too risky, then perhaps saying some universes of consumers might not be eligible to----

We had that situation last week in the Madoff hearing where we had both SEC and FINRA here, and, you know, asked very much suddenly, you know, on broker-dealers, if somebody says they were an investment adviser and FINRA is looking, they…

I think your question is right at the heart of it.

I think that is the point that Senator Warner is making, and I think if you have a strong, sensible, balanced regulatory system, the world could also follow us.

My concern is, Mr. Chairman, that we clearly need to do a better job of protecting the consumer.

No examination beyond meeting the definition.

I had a family member who I warned time and again do not get into this adjustable rate mortgage.

So there has to be some protection component.

Even if we have a regulated system, you could make the argument that might be the safer system.

So in this case, in the case of Madoff, my understanding was when he became an investment advisor, didn't he use the investment advisor reasoning as one way to preclude FINRA from looking----

Is performance of funds one of the criteria you look at?

My sense is it clearly didn't in this case.

But are you saying--because I hope you are not saying that if you have somebody in looking at a broker dealer and they thought they were onto something and they thought something smelled bad, and all of a sudden the CEO of the firm said…

If we had perhaps had all four of those as criteria, might that have led to a more thorough analysis, not just in this firm but in other firms?

I think you hear the Committee's enormous concern and frustration with how this enormous fraud went undetected for so long.

I hope we have lots of time for questions, because I have got lots of questions.