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

A pricing mechanism, basically.

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

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 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 there has to be some protection component.

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----

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.

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

No examination beyond meeting the definition.

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

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

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

One of the questions, and I know that Senator Shelby and Senator Schumer have talked about additional resources.

Isn't that in and of itself another red flag that should have said, hey, is this guy doing this all out of the his good heartedness?

Absolutely. We often, in our examinations, investigations of broker dealers, take our jurisdiction as far as it can go, and then once we hit that jurisdictional dead end, refer that conduct over to the SEC.

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

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

I would think that actually the Enforcement Division's location in the greater Washington area is still a pretty good place for it to be located.

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…

And there was no--from your investigators, there was no skepticism about it? There was no red flag? They accepted that at face value?

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

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