Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I commend the Senator from California for her amendment. As one of the people who was charged by the chairman to work on this section of how we make sure we put appropriate barriers to firms getting too large and barriers to firms being too big to fail, and should they fail, making sure taxpayers are never on the hook again, I think the amendment of the Senator from California adds that emphasis. We took the chairman's charge at his word.
This is an area where there was complete bipartisan agreement. I had the good fortune of working with my friend and colleague, the Senator from Tennessee, on this issue. We put a strong preference in the bill toward bankruptcy as the normal process, and even put into place a new series of requirements for large firms--particularly internationally significant firms--to come forward to the regulators and describe how they can unwind themselves through an orderly bankruptcy process, that being the normal process. But in the event, as we saw in 2008, there may be times, even with the best laid plans, when you may reach a level of crisis that would require resolution, if there is resolution, it should not be propping up firms the way we did it in the fall of 2008. The resolution should be a death knell for any firm that is put into that process. It should be something any logical management team or series of shareholders would want to avoid at all costs.
We put forward a process where it is postfunded. I think reasonable folks can agree on which is the best option. At the end of the day, if there are any funds used to make sure we can unwind this firm in an orderly process so that it doesn't cause any further systemic damage to the overall financial system, and indirectly to the American taxpayer, and if the financial system is shored up by that action, that any costs not recouped--if this firm goes out of business and it is being put out of business, if there are funds expended and they have to be recouped from some source, that source should not be the American taxpayer.
Again, I commend the Senator from California for her efforts with this amendment. It adds that exclamation point. Again, I cannot imagine that my colleagues on the other side, who I know share the same view, do not want to make sure taxpayers will never be exposed again by the mistakes made by Wall Street. I think this amendment is a good place to start this debate, where we have that common cause.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
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