Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman for yielding. I will be very brief on this. I very much appreciate the fact that the settlement was done in a bipartisan manner. I very much appreciate the fact as to what the overall intent of the settlement efforts were by the administration and the State attorneys general. We're not questioning that at all. It's a very interesting analogy that you make as far as the servicers being the agent of the investors, but remember who you're talking about as to who those investors are. They are the pension funds in your districts; they are the unions in your districts who have their pension funds invested in mortgage-backed securities; they are the retirees in your districts who went and, through a mutual fund or some other sort of fund, bought an investment--a bond or what have you--that was in mortgage-backed securities. Now, yes, a third party, if you will, another party--the servicers-- made some bad decisions in this. But the way this works is that the State attorneys general and the DOJ went after--who? Basically the four or five largest banks, which is about 20 percent of the industry, figuring that they would be the best targets to go after. Fine. That narrows it down who you're going to go after. Now you give them the discretion as to which mortgages they're going to write down--I'm going to write down this one; I'm going to write down this one. Which ones am I going to basically help out through bailing out the home buyers?…”