Political Quotes

“Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak about trying to get jobs to start going up along with the stock market. You know, it was only 1 year ago in one week that Wall Street, the stock market was crashed to its lowest level in years. In that past year, it has recovered; but while it has recovered, unemployment is still hovering in the range of 10 percent, underemployment is in the range of 17 or 18 percent. There are over 27 million Americans who are seeking work or not working enough, and we are not going to have an economic recovery until those folks are back to work. How did this happen? It happened, we know, because of the excessive lending, reckless lending largely engineered by Wall Street firms that stood to gain an awful lot of profit. What happened? We, the American taxpayer, had to bail out Wall Street, $750 billion. People didn't want to do it, but they had a gun to the head of the American economy, and the collateral damage of inaction would have been much more havoc to people's pensions, to unemployment, and to Main Street. But 1 year later, Wall Street is back, but lending by Wall Street to our small businesses has gone down, not up. If we are going to get jobs back, if we are going to get people back to work, we need our banks--and it tends to be our local banks--to start doing some lending. They have been doing the job, but Wall Street hasn't.”