Political Quotes

“I want to speak about two things. One is how do we get lending going for small businesses. And two, what is a practical thing we can do to create 600,000 to 850,000 jobs. What happened? Wall Street went on strike. After they made record profits and record bonuses by making record bets with taxpayer money, they put a gun to the head of the American economy and lost billions and billions of dollars. Henry Paulson, then the Treasury Secretary under a conservative President, George Bush, came to Congress hat in hand, acknowledged that he was embarrassed, and asked for a $750 billion bailout. Now, I was on that conference call with Mr. Paulson, and many of us were shocked that this former Goldman Sachs head was acknowledging failure but saying, If you don't help us out on the bets we made, we will have an implosion that will have collateral consequences that are absolutely catastrophic for Main Street. It is 15 months later, and what has happened? Wall Street is back to its old ways.”