Frank Holds Press Conference on Financial Reform, (3/5/09)
Now, I think what we saw, because the current crisis -- metaphors are inescapable, as much as I am opposed to them in principle, I've got to keep using them -- we had bullets and guns. The bullets which helped destroy the financial system were primarily the irresponsible subprime mortgages. Now, we tried to ban those -- some of us tried to ban them in 2005. The Republicans wouldn't allow that to go forward. We did pass the bill in 2007, while it couldn't pass the Senate. Chairman Bernanke, to his credit, has used authority that Alan Greenspan explicitly refused to use and that's promulgated some rules to do that. But the most important thing to do is to make sure that the kind of subprime loans that were made to people who should not have been getting loans don't get made again. But there will be other irresponsible things people will do if we don't step in, so we have to not just stop them from making the bullets. We have to make sure that they don't start misdirecting the guns again. And the guns were the instruments by which these irresponsible loans were distributed throughout the financial system, the collateralized debt obligations and then the credit default swaps that were brought up to -- to deal with them. So we have got to empower some entities that don't now have it to restrain risk-taking that is irresponsible. And there's one particular part of this that cuts across this that I feel very strongly about. I think a large part of the problem came from the phenomenon of securitization, which does a lot of good, because it allows money to be circulated more quickly. But it substantially diminished the constraint of people not lending money to people that they didn't think could pay them back. The discipline of the lender-borrower relationship has been lost or substantially weakened by securitization. So I will be pushing for legislation that will make it illegal for anybody to securitize 100 percent of anything. Now, what percentage of retention is there is open for debate. I do think it is clear that whatever the percentage of retention is, it should follow the principle that the first dollar of loss goes to the securitizer. I think that was part of the problem with the rating agencies. Once thousands of mortgage originators have made loans that they shouldn't have made because they were going to securitize them and didn't worry about whether or not they would be repaid, there's no way in the world anybody can go back and tell you whether they were good or bad loans. I have become convinced, as we looked at rating agencies' quantitative models, diversification, whatever the proposals were, if enough bad loans, if enough bad decisions are made initially, there's virtually no way to undo the harm. You can diminish it. You can't get rid of it. The only way to do that is to try to stop the bad loans originally, and that means, as I said, not allowing people to securitize 100 percent of anything, but to make sure that people retain some loss. That was the principle we did follow in our subprime bill, because we put liability on the securitizers, because they were the ones who had to do some checking, but we also put liability on the -- we put some restrictions on the originators. And that's our goal. So just to recap, I can understand -- some of the stuff we do, subprime loans, credit cards, it's not the stuff of headlines. A number of people in this country have their own jobs to do, families to take care of, their own hobbies to pursue. They were not following everything we did as closely. They don't know who was in power when and who did what when. For many people, their first look at what the federal government was doing through the financial system was to see the elected officials and appointed officials extending aid to the people that they were told caused the problem in the first place. Not surprisingly, that has made them angry. That's why I want to call attention to the fact that that's not the beginning of the movie. And we are going to go back to where we were when that part came up. Yes, we have to respond to the need to restart the financial system, and that includes being nicer than a lot of people would like to some of the people in the financial institutions, although by no means all of them, but there's that problem. That cannot, however, be allowed to be the only thing that people see us doing. So banning subprime loans, pressing the authorities for prosecutions, both criminal and civil, both to talk about sentencing people who committed crimes, but also trying to recover funds that should be recovered, and also reforming consumer practices, like credit cards. It is annoying to people to see that the bank that they feel has treated them unfairly on their credit cards or their overdraft is now getting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. And, in some cases, they are correct; they have been treated unfairly. And we will also, most equally importantly, be looking at trying to put the rules in effect that keep this from happening again. So it is important that people see the whole picture.


