Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I will not object. Let me respond for a moment, if I might, to the Senator from Connecticut. I have indicated I wish to offer an amendment at some point. I want to know if I am on the list.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the word ``promise'' actually made the day for me. So I will not object, and look forward to offering that amendment at the earliest opportunity.

Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield for a clarification?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me clarify that my position is to ban what are called naked or synthetic credit default swaps, not ban credit default swaps. Those with no insurable interest of any kind are considered naked credit default swaps. It appears to me that 70 to 80 percent of all credit default swaps are in that category; they have no insurable interest. So I did not want the Senator to think I want to ban credit default swaps. That is not the case. Naked credit default swaps, yes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, May 13, 2010, at 9:30 a.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing entitled ``Does Indian School Safety Get a Passing Grade?'' Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at (202) 224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I will join my colleague from Connecticut in opposing the amendment on the floor if it weakens the underlying bill, but I do not come to speak about that proposal at the moment. I wanted to speak about an amendment I have discussed previously on the issue of too big to fail. There is much yet to do on this subject of too big to fail. I recall, in a room just steps from here, on a Friday, I believe it was, the Treasury Secretary leaning over the lectern in a very stern way saying to the caucus that I was involved in, if within 3 days a three-page bill granting $700 billion to the Secretary of the Treasury, with which to provide funds to stabilize some of the biggest financial institutions in the country, if that did not come about, our economy could very well collapse completely. I remember that moment and remember thinking that it was pretty bizarre that our country got to that point: that all of a sudden 1 day, after being told month after month that the economy was strong, the economy was in good shape, that there were some ripples and hiccups here and there, but things were on course and we had confidence in the strength of the economy, that we were now being told the economy may well collapse in days unless the Congress comes up with $700 billion. Why was that the case? Because institutions that were so large in this country, at the top of the financial industry, were so important to the economy that their failure could very well result in failure of the entire American economy. That is what is called too big to fail. Let me show a chart that shows the six largest financial institutions in the country and what has happened to them since 1995. This is their growth as a percentage of GDP. It shows that they are getting larger and larger and larger and much larger. Even during this period of near collapse, the same institutions that were judged too large to fail and judged to represent a grave risk to the entire economy have gotten larger than just too big to fail. We had a vote yesterday, but that cannot be the end of this discussion about how to address too big to fail. The vote yesterday was rather Byzantine, as far as I was concerned. I was not someone who was a big fan of the $50 billion to be pre-funded for resolution of too- big-to-fail companies. But having said that, to decide that the $50 billion, which would come from the very institutions that are too big to fail, should be abolished, and that the funds instead would come from the FDIC, which are initially funds from the American taxpayer, made no sense to me. Then suggesting that it will be all right because the FDIC will be repaid with the sale of assets--oh, really? Well, firms that are too big to fail that are going to get in trouble in the future are not going to have very many assets. They are going to be in trouble because of dramatic amounts of overleverage, leverage that goes far beyond their ability to continue to do business. And when the firm comes tumbling down, I fail to see where assets are going to exist in substantial quantity to repay the taxpayer. But that was yesterday. I did not support that. That was yesterday. This issue of creating a circumstance of early warning on too-big-to- fail firms is not satisfactory to me. The only way to resolve too big to fail is to abolish too big to fail. I mean abolish too big to fail. That means having firms that are not too big to fail, that will not cause a moral hazard or a grave risk to the entire economy should they fail. Do you believe that is the case with this graph? Is there anything here that--as this graph shows, we have firms that are too big, far too big to fail. Is there anything here that is going to solve that in this bill? The answer is no. The only direct and effective way to address this is to decide, if you are, in fact, too big to fail, then there has to be some sort of divestiture or dissolution to bring that firm back down to a point where in size and scope such firm is not too big to fail and is not causing the kind of dramatic special risk to the country's economy that it would bring the economy down with it. That is the only direct and effective solution. Is that radical? Well, I have an amendment that requires that if you are determined to be too big to fail, then we begin a process, over 2 years, of breaking away those parts that make you too big to fail. Is it a radical idea? I do not think so. One-fourth of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board says we ought to do that. Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed: Too big to fail is not a policy, it is a problem. Too big to fail means too big period. We ought to break them up. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, James Bullard, president and chief executive officer: I do kind of agree that too big to fail is too big to exist. The economist, Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner: Too-big-to-fail banks have perverse incentives. If they gamble and win, they walk off with the proceeds. If they fail, taxpayers, pick up the tab. Alan Greenspan--I seldom, if ever, agree with Alan Greenspan, but I have used a quote of his to describe where we are now. He was around sitting on his hands for a good many years while these problems developed, despite the fact that he had the authority to have avoided them. Then he has written a book acting as if he was exploring the surface of Mars while all of this went on. But now he says: The notion that risks can be identified in a sufficiently timely manner to enable the liquidation of a large failing bank with minimum loss has proved untenable during this crisis, and I suspect in the future crises as well. Simon Johnson, professor of entrepreneurship, the Sloan School: There is simply no evidence, and I mean no evidence, that society gains from banks having a balance sheet larger than $100 billion. I do not know whether I agree or disagree with that. But his point is that too big to fail means too big. Arnold King, Cato--I seldom quote Cato on the floor of the Senate. But, you know, strange bed fellows: Big banks are bad for free markets. There is a free market case for breaking up large financial institutions--that our big banks are a product not of economics but of politics. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, this is the third Fed president: I think they should be broken up. And in doing so, I think you will make the financial system itself more stable, more competitive, and I think you will have long-run benefits over our current system. We broke up Standard Oil in this country into 23 different pieces. It turned out the 23 pieces were more valuable than Standard Oil was. I am not saying just go in and break up things just for the purpose of breaking up. I am saying this: If there is a standard by which we judge that an institution is too big to fail and causes a dramatic risk to the economy as a whole should it fail, a moral hazard, unacceptable risk to the entire economy, then it seems to me like this issue of creating early warnings and stop signs and sirens and so on is largely irrelevant. What we need to do is do something direct and effective and something we all knew we should do; that is to say, if you are too big to fail, and judged to be so, and judged to pose those kinds of risks to our economy, then you must break off pieces. We would, over a 2-year period, require that to happen until you are not too big to fail. Let me show a couple of quick charts. This one shows the top financial institutions: The Big Get Bigger. This chart shows the same thing, measuring assets and liabilities: The Big Get Bigger. Much, much bigger. The first chart I showed today demonstrates why, if we do not pass the amendment I suggest, we can thumb our suspenders and crow all we want in every hallway in this Capitol Building, but we will have not done what was necessary to be done to address too big to fail. We just will not do it. So I have an amendment. I am here because I am pestering those who are lining up amendments to make certain I have a chance to debate and vote on that amendment, and that will be the test of whether this Congress has learned a lesson; whether, when someday a Treasury Secretary leans over a lectern and says: If I do not get $700 billion to bail out the big interests that ran this country into the ditch, our whole economy is going into the ditch. So I hope very much that we will have the opportunity to both simply and effectively do what is necessary to finally and thoughtfully address this issue of too big to fail. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have come to speak in support of the Sanders amendment. I am intrigued by my colleague's presentation, so I will respond to a bit of it. There are a couple of areas where we agree and some where I profoundly disagree, but let me start with the agreement. When my colleague says, If you are too big to fail, you are too big and you ought to get smaller, I fully agree with that. I have an amendment that says if you are too big to fail--judged by the council in this bill that you are too big to fail, at that point you require the breaking up or the paring back of whatever is necessary of that institution to bring it below the level at which its failure would cause a moral jeopardy or an unacceptable risk to this country's entire economy. If we end this process and too big to fail still exists--that is, we have companies that are, in fact, too big to fail--then we will have failed, in my judgment. Too big to fail means you are too big. We have broken up Standard Oil into 23 pieces and it turns out that 23 pieces are more valuable than the whole. AT&T was broken up. I am not interested in breaking up companies for the sake of it, but I am saying this: We know what has happened. This chart shows what has happened to the largest financial institutions in this country. It shows that with respect to assets and liabilities, the top six commercial financial institutions in this country have gotten bigger, bigger, bigger, and much, much, much bigger. Does that cause jeopardy to this country? Well, if you have been awake the last few years to watch $700 billion be pledged to avoid a calamitous event to this economy, then you understand that this is too big and something has to be done about it. Create early warnings? No, I don't think so. Stop signs? How about deciding that if you are too big, you are too big, and you have to pare back those portions of your institution that make you too big to fail and a moral hazard to this country that is an unacceptable risk to the future of this economy. Here is another chart that shows about the same thing. It shows the growth of these institutions going back to 1995. It is relentless, aggressive growth. If we end this without having addressed it, we will not have been able--we won't be able to tell the American people: We took care of too big to fail. So I agree with the Senator from Oklahoma on that point. Where we disagree is the notion that the problem here is us. Well, I will tell my colleagues what. The ``us'' bears plenty of responsibility, but let me talk about the ``us.'' It wasn't the ``us'' who decided in Countrywide Mortgage, which was the largest single mortgage company in this country, to write liars' loans, to decide to say to people, Hey, you want to get some money from us? We are a big company. We are making a lot of fees. We are paying a lot of money to our executives and we want you to come to us. In fact, I have an ad they ran, Countrywide, the biggest mortgage company in the country. Here is the ad: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us. We have money for you. Are you a bad risk? Are you a bad person? You can't pay your bills? Come to us. It wasn't the Congress that did that, I would say to my friend. This was Countrywide Mortgage. By the way, the guy who ran this organization got off with $200 million. So he is now under criminal investigation. But don't suggest to me that somehow that was the responsibility of somebody other than the guy running the company that puts up ads such as: Zoom Credit. It says: You have been bankrupt, slow credit, no credit, can't pay? Who cares? That is what was advertised to the American people. That wasn't somebody in this Chamber going out and saying, Hey, how about letting us give you a loan if you have bad credit. Was it somebody in this Chamber who decided we are going to create credit default swaps? That is like saying ``the devil made me do it'' from the old TV show. No, no, no. It was a group of people who are high fliers, hotshots, wearing silk shirts and monogrammed sleeves, and they go out and create all of these exotic instruments such as credit default swaps, and they weren't enough; they have to do synthetic or naked default swaps with no insurable interest on the other side of the transaction. It was simply wagering. It had nothing to do with investment. It wasn't somebody in this Chamber who said please do this. It was the most unbelievable greed and avarice I have ever seen in the history of this country by a lot of folks. It created big institutions--I am not saying everybody did it, but enough did it to imperil this country's economy and to require emergency action to, as the Treasury Secretary then said, ``save the American economy.'' All this was going on. Everybody was having a carnival and making lots of money. In 2008, Wall Street had a net loss of $35 billion and paid bonuses of $16 billion. I got a master's degree in business. I went to business school. There is no place that teaches that--to go lose a bunch of money and then pay huge bonuses. This was a carnival of greed that went on in this country and steered this country right into a ditch. When my colleagues say it is government that did that, I am sorry, that is flatout wrong. What government did--and they did it for a number of years in the last decade--is they hired a bunch--and the previous administration is especially responsible--of regulators who didn't like government and didn't want to regulate. One of the key people who came to this town in a key position of regulatory responsibility said: Hey, this is a new day. This is a business- friendly place. Understand that. We are going to be willfully blind here for a number of years. So do what you want; we won't watch and we don't care. So the responsibility for regulatory authority is not in this Chamber. I am not somebody who comes here to blame previous administrations very often, but when the Bush administration came to office--about the same time that Gramm-Leach-Bliley, by the way, with the support of the Clinton administration, repealed Glass-Steagall and said you can create big financial holding companies as big as you want and you can merge investment banks with commercial banks and security sales, and you can do it all--a one-stop financial shop. It will be great, and we will call it modern. About the time that passed--over my objections, as I was one of eight Senators who voted no, and I was out here six, eight times opposing it--about that time, we had a new administration come in and say: We are going to put regulators in place who have no interest in watching what you do, so do what you want. They put out naked credit default swaps and trillions of dollars for them. Who cares? If you want to increase your leverage from 12 times, to 20 times, to 30 times your capital, fine. We will have a meeting in the basement of the SEC, and we will, just like that, approve you to be able to increase your leverage to 30 times your capital. And it will hardly be reported by anybody because we are not watching anything. They were blind regulators--dead blind. Unbelievable. Don't blame this on someone else. We can blame it on bad legislation a decade ago. That is fair. Those who were making bad loans and taking big checks to the bank and filling it with millions of dollars were doing it because they were greedy and nobody was willing to stop them. That avalanche of greed built into a bubble of speculation that really injured this country and nearly ran it off a cliff. By the way, at the same time all of this was happening in the last 15 years or so, the financial institutions decided they were going to securitize everything. Doesn't matter; find some debt, and we have people who can roll it into a security. Once they do that, they can sell it three, four times, to an investment bank, to a hedge fund, you name it, and they can get a rating agency--because the investment banks pay the costs of the rating agencies that rate their securities, which is a pretty big conflict of interest--to help roll these forward, and nobody has any skin in the game. My colleague talks about how unfair it would be to ask somebody to save at least a portion of a loan they are providing. Do you know what? The only way you have proper underwriting of loans in this country is if you sit across the table from somebody who wants to get a loan and look at their credit reports and determine if they are eligible. The only way you ever ensure that happens the right way is to have that kind of underwriting, and you would do that if you are going to have some continuing risk. But if you are going to give a $750,000 loan to somebody who makes $17,000 a year--and it happened, by the way--a liar's loan, requiring no documentation, with no interest or principal paid because he put it all on the back side--if you can sell that in a security to somebody else and you have no further risk, you get your money free and clear. That is what was going on at every single level. It was just the most unbelievable, irresponsible lack of regulation, perhaps, in the history of this country. I want to say that the government has made plenty of mistakes, but don't blame this Chamber or people who were elected to the Senate for the bad behavior of somebody who takes $200 million away from the biggest mortgage finance company in this country and was selling liar's loans and advertising that if you have bad credit, no credit, slow credit, and bankruptcy, come to us, we are going to give you money. Don't blame that on somebody else. Put that blame where it rests--the unbelievable greed among the people who should have known better and should not have been able to do it in the first place because the regulators should have been all over them in a moment, saying: You cannot do it. That didn't happen. This demonstrates the need for effective regulation. The free market system works, but when people try to subvert it, when people commit fouls in the free market system, it needs a referee with a whistle and a striped shirt. That was missing in the last decade. Mr. President, one final point. Part of this argument is excusing criminal behavior because there wasn't a cop on the beat. Don't excuse the criminal behavior. We need cops on the beat. We need legislation that will make sure we close the loopholes that exist. We need to legislate soberly and thoughtfully and give the American people some notion that this behavior cannot happen again. By the way, I think the way we do that is to make certain you cannot be too big to fail. By what justification should the major financial companies of this country continue this kind of concentration and escalation of size in a manner that jeopardizes this country should they fail? By what justification should we allow that to continue? The answer is that it should not. There are two amendments to address that I am aware of--one by Senators Brown and Kaufman, which creates a numerical limit on size, and I fully support. The other one, which I prefer because it has my name on it, is to flatout break up firms that have gotten too big to fail to the point where they are not too big to fail. That is the most effective way, in my judgment, to do this. I will speak ever so briefly about the Sanders amendment. I got sidetracked by my colleague from Oklahoma, as is so often the case. My colleague from Vermont has offered a piece of legislation that I think has great merit. Let me tell you what it doesn't do. It does not, as those who fear the amendment say, invoke the tentacles of the U.S. Congress in the construction of monetary policy. That area belongs to the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board is a creature of legislation that Congress created. If you went back and read the debate, the country was assured that this was not creating a strong central bank. There were just lead pipe assurances to that, but, of course, that turned out not to be the case. Nonetheless, the Federal Reserve Board creates monetary policy, and there is a thought--and I agree with it--that we don't want monetary policy created on the floor of the Senate. We don't want to intrude on the creation or development of monetary policy. We do fiscal policy, the taxing and spending side. The monetary side is the Federal Reserve Board's terrain. But the Federal Reserve Board ought not be unaccountable to anybody for anything. The Federal Reserve Board, it seems to me, deserves, No. 1, to be audited properly--a Government Accountability Office audit-- which the Sanders amendment would require. And I know the Fed is having an apoplectic seizure thinking that maybe this amendment will pass. You know what. It is the right thing to do, to say at long, long last, there should be an audit of the Federal Reserve Board. I am not talking about auditing monetary policy but what it does generally. It is necessary, and I support this and think it is the right policy. No. 2, this legislation does what I and many others have been pushing the Fed for, for some while. Last July of 2009, I had a letter signed by 10 of my colleagues to Chairman Bernanke saying: You have now used your emergency powers for the first time in U.S. history to open your loan window to investment banks, as never before in the history of our country. Serious financial problems, you say? Open the loan window and come and get some money. So we write and say: OK, you did that on an emergency basis for the first time in our history. What was the result? Who got the money? What were the terms and the conditions? The American people deserved to have that information. I wrote again on March 19 of this year. On both occasions, we received letters from Chairman Bernanke that were polite, thoughtful, but that said: You know what. We don't intend to provide you or the American people information about what happened at our loan window. We don't intend to talk about the loans we gave to investment banks for the first time in history. I wonder--and this is idle curiosity--did we have investment banks show up at this window and get near zero interest rate loans and then invest them back into Treasury bonds? How much money did they make on that transaction? I know many of these organizations--the largest investment banks--are now making record profits. But it is not as a result of loaning money to businesses in this country that need the lending; it is by trading securities--once again, right back in the same trench. This legislation that my colleague, Senator Sanders, has offered is legislation that will put in law a requirement that the Federal Reserve Board disclose the activities, in a certain period of time, of who received the lending from the Federal Reserve Board, what the conditions were, and what the amounts of funding were. The Chairman of the Fed, who said this might make it very difficult and it will undermine this and that, undermine these programs, publicly releasing names--look, two Federal courts have required the Federal Reserve Board to do this. Two Federal courts--the district court and the appellate court--have said the Federal Reserve Board does not have the authority to withhold this information. The Federal Reserve Board has once again said: It doesn't matter, we intend to appeal again. They, apparently, intend to keep this tied up in the court system as long as they can. This amendment in this piece of legislation will say to the Federal Reserve Board: You cannot do that. The law requires you to disclose to the American people what you have done. I come here to say I think this is a good bill. I had introduced a separate amendment on the disclosure by the Fed, but if we pass the Sanders amendment, that will take care of my amendment. Some people talked earlier about duplicates. Mine will be taken care of if we pass the larger amendment offered by Senator Sanders. I support the amendment. I know a good many of my colleagues will too. It has been a long time to try to get an audit of the Federal Reserve Board--not an audit of the monetary policy but an audit of the Federal Reserve Board. But if we do that, this will be a significant step forward for those of us who believe that is necessary and important for the country. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Rhode Island for his courtesy, and I thank Senator Dodd. I was here earlier. I will come and talk about that queue as it exists. I hope my amendment on too big to fail will be part of the early amendments.

Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DORGAN. I think it is commendable that there has been a burst of activity on the Senate floor in the last couple of hours. We have had a number of votes. It took some while to wait for this to happen. I agree with the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator from Alabama that to the extent we can accommodate votes on a wide range of subjects--this is an issue that is very consequential to the future of the country, and we want to get it right. From my standpoint, I have a couple of amendments I think are very important. Time agreements are not a problem for me. I am interested in having the opportunity to explain an amendment and have a short debate and then have the Senate register its judgment. I appreciate what the Senator just said. He would like to see us move along and be able to offer amendments. There are a lot of them on too big to fail and credit default swaps. I will talk to the managers. I hope I will have an opportunity to get them on the floor and get them offered.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, before the Senator from Rhode Island speaks, let me just ask if he will yield so that I may ask a question.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senator from Montana has offered an amendment. I am trying to determine if there is a list and how I might get on the list. I might propound the question to the Senator from Connecticut. There has been a Republican amendment offered, and that was set aside and the Senator from Montana offered one. I would like to talk to whoever is making a list.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I know the Senator from Connecticut has been on the floor all of this day managing a piece of legislation, and it appears to be kind of a lonely process here. He is managing what is a very important piece of legislation dealing with financial reform or Wall Street reform. I know he is perhaps as frustrated as everybody else that we are not making more progress and voting on amendments. I know work is going on behind the scenes as well. I hope we will be able to move ahead and get a good piece of legislation through the Senate. I don't know what time it will take, but what is far more important is that we get it right. The consequences of not making the changes necessary would be that we would experience again at some point in the future the kind of financial crisis we have seen in the last couple years. It is a significant crisis for a lot of Americans--about $15 trillion of lost value, but that is an aggregate number that doesn't mean much. What means something is that millions of people are losing their jobs, their homes, and many are losing hope. That is the consequence of this kind of very deep recession--the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Following the Great Depression, if you read the economic history of the country, you will find that a number of very aggressive pieces of legislation were put into place to protect our country and make certain that could not happen again. Those pieces of legislation enacted into law lasted for a long time--70 or 80 years--to protect this country's economic interests. But what happened was that a number of people decided they were old-fashioned provisions and needed to be modernized, so we had modernization legislation that I did not support. We had to modernize the system. That modernization a decade ago caused massive problems. So now we are back having experienced the last couple of years and a very deep recession that is not a natural economic disaster; it is manmade. I think it is caused by the most unprecedented greed this country has ever seen among some of its largest financial institutions. It is important to say that banking is critical to this country's economic existence. You need production and you need finance. I don't think we ought to suggest--and nobody has--that finance is not worthwhile. It is very important. You can't produce or have businesses without the ability to provide finance for those businesses. But over a couple of centuries of economic history in this country, sometimes producers have had the upper hand; sometimes those in the finance production have had the upper hand. For the last 15, 20 years, those in finance production in this country have had an unbelievable amount of clout and sway and the upper hand. That has caused us serious problems. Today, I am not talking about the origins of this latest economic wreck--I have done that many times before--but starting with the subprime loan scandal that permeated much of the country, there was unbelievable greed and excess, securitization of bad mortgages that were rated AAA and passed from one to another, from mortgage bankers, to hedge funds, to investment banks, and back and forth. Then even that wasn't enough. They were passing a bunch of bad paper around where everybody was making big fees, not knowing what they were buying, and buying things they would not get from people who never had it. That wasn't enough. Then we created synthetic securities and naked swaps. I guess that was a natural extension by those who were greedy enough to believe you have to have something to trade no matter what the circumstances. So they created instruments--debt instruments, securities, and others--that had no value. They were debt instruments related to values of things that were extraneous, so there was no insurable interest. A naked credit default swap is something that has no insurable interest on either end. It is simply two people who have decided to bet on whether a bondholder over there may or may not default, despite the fact that neither of these people has an economic interest in the bond. They are just making a wager. They could have just as well put it on black or red at the roulette wheel or played the craps table or played blackjack. It is not an investment; it is just betting. That all went on, and there was a dramatic amount of new leverage and borrowing. I cannot begin to describe the excess that occurred. I guess the final circumstance for me to see what was wrong with all of this was that in 2008 the ``Wall Street'' firms earned a net negative of about $36 billion, that is, they had $36 billion of losses, and still paid, I believe, $17 billion in bonuses. That represents sort of the most egregious excesses you can imagine. The question now and the circumstance that exists that I know the Senator from Connecticut cares a lot about is how do we restore confidence? How do we restore some confidence for the American people going forward? If we do not have confidence, this economy is not going to expand and rebound. The answer is, we put together a piece of legislation called Wall Street or financial reform and construct it the right way to try to make certain the things that were done cannot be done again, to make certain the kind of economic wreck that occurred cannot happen again. My colleague from the Banking Committee, the chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Dodd, and others have done quite a good job of putting together a piece of legislation that moves in that direction. It can be improved, in my judgment, and perhaps will be. I know he will agree with that as well. There are other ideas that can be brought to the floor of the Senate on this legislation. I am going to talk about two of them ever so briefly--actually three, but one of them will be very quick. Senator Grassley and I intend to offer an amendment that says to the Federal Reserve Board: You must disclose to whom you were providing emergency assistance during the financial debacle on Wall Street, including loans out of the discount window to investment banks for the first time in history. You must disclose whom you provided loans to, what the terms were, and how much those loans amounted to. Two Federal courts--the district court and now the appeals court--have ordered the Fed to do so. The American people, they said, deserve to know. The Fed announced they intend to appeal that once again. Tomorrow, Senator Grassley and I will offer an amendment that says the law will require them to make that disclosure. The American people deserve to know. On the other two issues, one is on too big to fail. This is central to the bill. There are a lot of ideas about too big to fail. Mine is, I think, the most direct, the most decisive, and the most effective. If the Financial Stability Oversight Council decides that an institution is too big to fail--that is, by definition, the construct and size of that organization would create a moral hazard to this country, would create unacceptable risks and grave risks to the entire future of the American economy--if that is the case, if that is the judgment, then it seems to me you have to pare back portions of that enterprise until it is not any longer too big to fail and causing grave risk to the future of this economy. In my judgment, the most direct and reasonable thing to do is to simply require that you restructure and require divestiture, where necessary, of those portions of an institution that have become too big to fail and cause a grave risk to the future of this country's economy, should they fail. I will be offering that amendment. I know it is different than some others. My colleagues, Senator Brown and Senator Kaufman, have an amendment which I will vote for and support as well on this issue. I think this is probably the most direct and probably the most effective amendment on the issue of too big to fail. Finally, I am going to offer an amendment that would ban what are called naked credit default swaps. If people want to gamble, just bet one another. There are plenty of places to do that in America. Las Vegas comes to mind. Atlantic City comes to mind. It seems to me, we should not mistake betting for investing. We ought to get back to basics in our financial institutions. I think we have something close to $25 trillion of credit default swaps that exist now. I don't know what percent of them have no insurable interest, that represent just wagers, just flatout bets rather than investments. In England, a study suggested that about 80 percent of credit default swaps are what are called naked credit default swaps with no insurable interest. If that is the case on this side, we are talking about a notional value of perhaps $16 trillion, $17 trillion of instruments out there that simply allow for the making of wagers that have nothing at all to do with the insurable interest and bonds. I mentioned earlier that Mr. Pearlstein, who writes for the Washington Post, once observed a pretty simple question: Why should there be more insurance policies to insure bonds than there are bonds to insure? The answer is obvious. They created these excess insurance policies that have no insurable interest so people could just gamble. It is fine if you are gambling with your own money, but once you start gambling with the taxpayers' money, if you are a federally insured bank and the taxpayers are going to bear the risk, that is a different matter. I am going to offer these amendments. I say, again, as I said when I started, all of us who come to this debate about financial reform or Wall Street reform understand that an effective, functioning system of finance in this country is essential to the well-being of America. I do not think anybody wants to take apart a system of finance that has the different levels of FDIC insured banking, commercial banking, investment banking, venture capitals, hedge funds--all those are important to this country's long-term future. I personally would like to see hedge funds and derivatives regulated. I have talked about that with Senator Feinstein and others for a long time. It is very important that we have a system of finance that has the confidence of the American people and that we need in order to finance the production in this country. Ultimately, all of us would like the productive sector to be repaired, to grow and hire people once again, employ people, and have ``Made in America'' put on products once again. All of us would like to see that happen. That will not happen unless we have a working system of finance as well. We had a hearing where representatives from three businesses came to that hearing. All three were small- to medium-sized businesses. All three had sailed through this deep recession, with some difficulty, but were still profitable. All three were ready to expand, ready to hire more people, and none of them could find any financing to do it. None of them have been delinquent. All of them had existing banking enterprises with which they had a relationship and always paid back everything they owed. They had never been delinquent. Yet they could not find the funding to expand their business and hire more people. That is what is wrong. Even today, by the way, some of these record profits that are coming from some of the biggest financial institutions are coming not as a result of their lending money to people but as a result of their trading, in many cases in some of the same securities that caused some of the same problems a couple years ago and over the last decade. This reform legislation is essential. This is one of the most important pieces of legislation we will have considered in this Congress--probably the most important. In many ways, the consequences of what we do will be with us for a decade or more. That is why it is important to get this right. I say to my colleague from Connecticut, I wish to be helpful to him. He has written a piece of legislation that has much to commend it. This Senate owes him a debt of thanks and the Banking Committee a debt of thanks. That does not mean we cannot offer amendments that might improve pieces here and there. But this is an awfully good start. My hope is, Senator Dodd will have sufficient cooperation in the Senate to begin getting votes on amendments so we can get through this, have the debate, and get the best ideas that everybody has to offer and get a piece of legislation that will give the American people some confidence once again. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wanted to, in a few minutes, talk about the START treaty. But before I do that, I would like to engage in some discussion with the Senator from Connecticut about financial reform. Even as I do that, and I will do that briefly, I wanted to say that not many Members of the Senate understand how much time and effort the Senator from Connecticut has put into this product of financial reform--Wall Street reform, as it is called. I, for one, very much appreciate the work that has been done. There is a lot in the bill that has been brought to the floor by Senator Dodd that is commendable and that is right on point. There are some areas where I, perhaps, will want to offer suggestions. Maybe the Senator will agree with them, maybe not. I wish to say as a starting point that I am very pleased that we have the bill on the floor now, open for debate, open for amendment next week. I hope we keep it on the floor and improve it in areas where it can be improved, make modifications where necessary, but in the end be able to vote for a piece of legislation that will allow us to tell the American people: We understand what happened, and we have tried to take steps now to make sure it cannot and will not happen again. One of the areas where I will offer an amendment--and I understand it will be a controversial amendment--is on the issue of too big to fail. My colleague from Connecticut and others on the Banking Committee have constructed one approach on too big to fail, and I will be supportive of that approach. But I do think the too-big-to-fail issue at its root is, if you are too big to fail, from my standpoint, you are too big. And I come down on the side of one-fourth of the Governors of the Federal Reserve Board who have said this, and many others. I come down on the side of those who have said: If you are too big to fail, you are too big. I think the council that is established under this legislation ought to at that point--once designating a company that has become too big to fail, that is too big to fail, that causes a moral hazard and an unacceptable threat and risk to our economy, then I think divestiture is in order of that portion of the company that puts this country at risk as a result of them being too big to fail. That is a different approach than is used by the committee but an approach that I think is still credible; an approach, in fact, that has been described by the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan, by, as I said, three members of the Federal Reserve Board saying: There ought to be divesture. That would be one of the amendments I will offer next week and discuss. Again, what has happened leading up to and since the near collapse of our economy, as a result of unbelievable activities at the top of our financial food chain, the largest financial enterprises have actually become much larger because of actions of the Federal Government, among other things, to encourage them to become larger. I think an appropriate amendment would be for us to have a real discussion about, should we not just decide if you are too big to fail, you are just too big.

Mr. DORGAN. I am happy to yield.

Mr. DORGAN. First, the point the Senator from Connecticut made, which is so important, is effective regulatory authority. If we don't have regulations that work or regulators who care, what happens is what happened to us in the last couple years. We have a buildup of substantial risk, effectively allowing some to gamble rather than invest. We desperately need effective regulatory capability and regulators who care. I understand the risk council in the underlying bill is allowed to go toward divestiture but not require it.

Mr. DORGAN. My point is, I will offer an amendment that would actually require it at the front end, simply saying, if we have a category that is described as too big to fail, meaning this is too large an organization to be allowed to fail, which in my lexicon is no- fault capitalism, if they are now at such a size that they are too big to fail, they pose a moral hazard, a grave threat and risk to the economy, if they were to fail, then I say do as we have done on some other occasions. We broke up Standard Oil into 26 parts, and it turns out the value of the parts was substantially greater than the value of the whole. It turned out to be a pretty wonderful thing. We broke up AT&T for other reasons. I am not rushing to try to break up anybody, but if we are serious about describing that which we think creates substantial, additional risk in the future, then we should take action to eliminate those kinds of risks, if the risk is, in this case, too big to fail. I would like to get rid of the category of too big to fail. The Federal Reserve Board has had such a category for a long time. We have always known that if one is too big to fail, they are at a significant advantage to virtually every other financial institution. They can do business. They can take risks, but they can't fail. They are too big to fail and, competing with them, they have a safety net. My amendment will be simply, if you get to that point where this council judges you to be too big to fail without substantial grave risk to the country's economy, then I think divestiture that is sufficient to get the institution back to an area where it is not too big to fail would be in the public interest. My amendment would require divestiture. The other amendment I will be offering is one that is also perhaps controversial. That is on the issue of naked credit default swaps or what some people call synthetic default swaps. They have been described, accurately so, as betting or wagering rather than investing. I have heard the descriptions of the investment bankers about why they are useful in dealing with risk and so on. But it is not useful, from my perspective, to have the largest financial institutions collecting fees for the purpose of arranging wagers. There are places to make wagers, if we call the wager simply gambling. Las Vegas and Atlantic City come to mind. But with respect to credit default swaps, which is a new term in the discussion these days, credit default swaps themselves represent insuring against a bond default, for example. But a naked credit default swap means you have no insurable interest in anything. You are simply betting someone else about something that might happen with a bond issue, despite the fact neither of you own the bond. I began thinking about a column Mr. Pearlstein wrote in the Washington Post. He always writes interesting columns. He said: Why should there be allowed more insurance against bonds than there are bonds? Then I read a piece that in England they actually tried to categorize it, what percent of the credit default swaps were synthetic or naked, having no insurable interest? The answer was about 80 percent. Think of that. About 80 percent of these naked credit default swaps have no insurable interest on anything. It is just a way to wager. I believe that is a category that ought not be allowed. I will offer an amendment on that. I recognize that that may also be a controversial issue but one, nonetheless, I think is important. Nobody knows this better than the chairman of the committee. I think it is important we have a productive sector to produce things, to produce things that might have a label that says ``Made in America.'' It is important we have a financial sector because we can't produce without finance. Production is necessary for finance as well. If you look at a couple hundred years of economic history, you will find that, in some cases for decades, production has the upper hand and finance is out here sort of moving at the beck and call of production. Then, in other areas, the financing industry has the upper hand. You see it move back and forth. We have been through a couple decades in which finance has the upper hand and has been calling the shots. It is critically important to have a system of finance, and that system includes investment banks, FDIC-insured banks, venture capital funds, a wide array of financial institutions. We desperately need that. We can't have an economy that grows without it. But it is very important that financial system be one that has proper, effective regulation so we don't see it spin out of control as we have seen in the last 10 or 15 years. In 1994--15\1/2\ half years ago--I wrote the cover story for the Washington Monthly magazine. The title of my cover story was ``Very Risky Business.'' I took a part of a title of a movie back then. At that point, I think there was something like $18 or $28 billion notional value of derivatives out in the economy. I talked about the risk those derivatives posed to our banking institutions that were trading on their own proprietary accounts on derivatives. It is not as if I have just discovered this issue. With Senator Feinstein from California and others, I have been on the floor many times talking about the need to regulate derivatives and regulate hedge funds. We have been spectacularly unsuccessful in that over the years, but now at long last, with the legislation that is coming to the floor and the opportunity to have a wide-open debate with a lot of amendments, I think all of us can believe that if we are successful--and I believe we can be--we will do something that has merit for the future stability of this country's economy. Again, I know there is a lot of language about banking and investment banking out there. I use some of it, perhaps, that is pretty hot language. Some of it is well deserved by a lot of people who made a lot of money, as they steered this country's economy into the ditch. But let it be known we need a financial system that works in order to finance production. All of us want the same thing. We want to put this country back on track and expand the economy and create jobs once again. That is the purpose of all this. I used to teach a bit of economics in college. I always described to students that the economy is not like some engine room on the ship of state where, if you get down in the engine room and find the right dials and switches and push them all just right, that the ship of state will move forward. It is not that at all. It is about confidence. If the American people are confident in the future, they do things that manifest that confidence and expand the economy. They buy a new suit of clothes, a car, a house, take a trip. They do the things that manifest their confidence in the future. That is expansive to the economy. If they are not confident, they do exactly the opposite. That contracts the economy. That is why this legislation is going to go a long way toward saying to the American people: You can have confidence this sort of thing is not going to happen again. That is the precursor to allowing us to see an economy that expands because people have some confidence in the future. I started by saying thank you to the Senator from Connecticut. I say, again, there is a lot of work that has gone into this. It is not perfect bill. There will be much that is controversial. I will offer a couple controversial amendments. At the end, I hope we will all have worked together to accomplish the same thing for the country--the opportunity for more economic growth and expansion and more hope and opportunity for American families. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for as much time as I may consume.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday there was a hearing in the Senate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty we have negotiated with Russia. I was not on the committee, but there was testimony by Dr. James Schlesinger and Dr. William Perry, two of the most veteran arms control experts, who came to the Foreign Relations Committee and said they support the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia. I was in Russia a couple weeks ago and had an opportunity to tour a number of sites that we are actually funding from the United States through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the partnership we have with Russia in a number of areas, stemming from, among other things, what is called the Nunn-Lugar law, the Nunn-Lugar program. I have long supported the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program called Nunn-Lugar, named after two of my colleagues, Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar. In the early 1990s, they wrote legislation that allows us to work with the Russians and other former Soviet states to deactivate nuclear weapons and to destroy delivery systems. I wish to show a couple of the photographs and if I might show something I have had in my desk for a while. I ask unanimous consent to do that. This is a photograph of a blackjack Russian bomber being dismantled. This is the wing strut from that bomber. I have a piece that was sawed off from the bomber's wing strut in my desk simply because it was given to me, and I thought it was so significant that the wing of a Soviet bomber that used to carry nuclear weapons, part of that wing is now in my Senate desk, not because we shot the Russian bomber down; it is because we actually provided the funding to saw the wings off and destroy the bomber. That is success. This is a photograph of a missile silo in the Ukraine. I have in my desk, as well, a hinge. This hinge came from that missile silo. That missile silo held an SS-18 missile with a nuclear warhead aimed at the United States of America. Now, where that missile silo once existed, with a missile and a warhead aimed at America, is now a field of sunflowers. You can see from this picture the missile silo was blown up, dismantled. I actually have a piece of the hinge. What a great success. The missile silo did not have a missile delivered to destroy a city in America. We actually spent the money to pay for the destruction of the missile silo under the Nunn-Lugar program. What a spectacular success that is. This next picture is of a submarine being dismantled. It is a Russian submarine. It is a Typhoon class ballistic missile submarine, and it would have carried missile tubes, and those missile tubes in that submarine under the water would have contained nuclear warheads that would have been used to destroy our country. Here, in this picture, is an example of the missile tubes on that submarine. These too were destroyed. I have a little vile of copper wire that was ground up that came from that submarine. Now, we did not sink that submarine in an act of warfare. We actually paid to have that submarine dismantled and the copper wiring ground up. I have some of the copper wiring here in my desk, just to remind us how important this program has been. Now, we have on this Earth about 25,000 nuclear weapons, roughly. This comes from the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2010. It is estimated Russia has about 15,000 nuclear weapons; the U.S. probably about 9,000-plus; China, a couple hundred; France, several hundred; Britain, a couple hundred. So here is the quantity of nuclear weapons on our planet. The question is, What would happen if someday in some way someone detonates a nuclear weapon in the middle of a major city on this planet? I know what will happen. It will change life on Earth as we know it. So let me describe a story. And keep in mind, we have 25,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. Let me describe a story. One month after 9/11, a CIA agent nicknamed Dragonfire reported to the CIA that he had evidence that a 10-kiloton Russian nuclear weapon had been stolen and had been smuggled into New York City and was to be detonated. That was 1 month after 9/11. It was October 11, 2001, to be exact. Dragonfire reported that al-Qaida terrorists had stolen a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb from the Russian arsenal and may have smuggled it into New York City. It was not reported at that point, but there was an apoplectic seizure here. The President and others who had this information were not sure whether it was accurate or not. It was a report from a CIA agent, and they--just in the shadow, 1 month later, of 9/11 of course-- were very much on their guard. Our country was pretty much shocked by everything that happened. So this report by Dragonfire meant that Vice President Cheney moved to a secret mountain facility, along with several hundred government employees, we are told. So they were the core of an alternative government that would operate if Washington, DC, were destroyed by a nuclear weapon. We are told that President Bush dispatched a nuclear emergency support team to New York to search for a weapon. To not cause panic, no one in New York City was informed of the threat, not even the mayor of New York. After a few weeks, the intelligence community determined that Dragonfire's report of someone having stolen a Russian nuclear weapon and smuggling it into this country was probably a false alarm. But when they did the post-mortem on it, they all understood it was perfectly possible that a nuclear weapon could have been stolen from the Russian arsenal, perfectly possible that a nuclear weapon could have been smuggled in to New York City or Washington, DC, and possible for terrorists to disarm the safeguards and explode the bomb. No one said it was impossible that a terrorist group would want to kill several hundred thousand Americans with one bomb in the middle of an American city. On the contrary, all of the experts knew this was possible. Now, all of that--by the way--all of that angst was about one 10-kiloton, rather small Russian nuclear weapon reported by a CIA agent to have been stolen. But there is more than one nuclear weapon; there are 25,000 nuclear weapons on this planet. Think of the concern about the potential stealing of one, and then ask the question, What do we have to do to make sure that nuclear weapons that now exist are safeguarded, that there is adequate security, and, even more important, that we stop the spread of nuclear weapons to others, other countries, and certainly terrorist groups who want to acquire nuclear weapons? The description of Dragonfire's report comes from a former Clinton administration official, Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear proliferation. He wrote about the incident in a book called ``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' The description I have just read is a part of the book by Mr. Allison. Now, even though the Cold War ended two decades ago, we still have, as I have indicated, about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Mr. President, 95 percent of them are owned by the United States or by Russia. We are now operating under the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty, also known as the Moscow Treaty. It requires the United States and Russia, by our agreement, to have no more than 2,200 ``operationally deployed'' strategic nuclear weapons by 2012. But it does not do anything to restrict nuclear delivery vehicles--bombers, missiles, submarines. And it does not have any verification measures. It expires in 2012. A few weeks ago President Obama and Russian President Medvedev met in Prague, the Czech Republic, and signed a new strategic arms control treaty. It is called START. It limits each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads--30 percent lower than the existing treaty. It limits each side to 800 deployed and nondeployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments--one- half of what the START treaty allowed. It sets a separate limit of 700 deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers that are equipped. It has verification regimes for on-site inspections, telemetry exchanges, data exchanges, and so on. Now, I know this treaty will be controversial in some quarters, but I want to describe what ADM Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said just in the last month, because some are worried about whether our nuclear weapons work, whether our stockpile is reliable. What if we use it? Can we expect it to work? Well, the other side of the nuclear debate is, if you use it, you probably will never be around to wonder whether it works. I think the face of this Earth will change if there is ever an exchange of nuclear weapons of any kind between adversaries that have multiple nuclear weapons. ADM Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says: I, the Vice Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as our combatant commanders around the world, stand solidly behind this new treaty, having had the opportunity to provide our counsel, to make our recommendations, and to help shape the final agreements. So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says they are satisfied with this treaty, believe it is a good treaty. Linton Brooks says something very important. He is the former NNSA, National Nuclear Security Administration, Administrator from 2003 to 2007. He says: START . . . is a good idea on its own merits, but . . . for those who think it's only a good idea if you only have a strong weapons program, I think this budget ought to take care of that. He is talking about the budget the President has sent to the Congress for life extension programs and the other things we do to make sure the nuclear stockpile is up to date. He said: Coupled with the out-year projections, it takes care of the concerns about the complex and it does very good things about the stockpile and it should keep the labs healthy. . . . He said: . . . I would've killed for this kind of budget. The reason I mention this is that we have people coming to the floor of the Senate now, and in public discussion--and Douglas Feith is an example of them. He says: Since the administration is so eager for [the treaty], the main interests of conservatives will relate to modernization. Republicans are interested in the U.S. nuclear posture, the political leverage they have will be the treaty. . . .One of the hot issues is going to be the replacement warhead. . . . What does that mean? That means we have had people in this Chamber and others--including the neocons, and Mr. Feith and others--they have always wanted to begin building new nuclear weapons. It started with: What we need to do is, we need to build new designer nuclear weapons. We need to build earth-penetrating bunker-buster weapons so we can use them. In Afghanistan there were some folks who were hold up down, well underground, and so: What we need to do is develop designer nuclear weapons, earth-penetrating bunker-buster nuclear weapons. Well, Senator Feinstein and I and some others got that abolished. It makes no sense to me for us to be off building new nuclear weapons. It just does not make any sense. The fact that the bunker-buster earth- penetrator was not built--that does not matter--then they came with the RRW, reliable replacement weapons. Substantial costs of additional funding to build new nuclear weapons called the replacement weapons. Here are some statements by some skeptical U.S. Senators about this START treaty: Well, I can tell you this, that I think the Senate will find it very hard to support this treaty if there is not a robust modernization plan. . . . Another Senator: The success of your administration in ensuring the modernization plan is fully funded in the authorization and appropriations process could have a significant impact on the Senate. . . . It means you have to be building additional nuclear weapons, you have to spend X amount of money here and there in order for us to support the START treaty. Another Senator says: My vote on the START treaty will thus depend in large measure on whether I am convinced the administration has put forward an appropriate and adequately funded plan to sustain and modernize the smaller nuclear stockpile it envisions. Let my say what the JASON says about all this. It is an organization that really knows what it is talking about and issues a lot of reports with respect to the science of nuclear weapons, because some have said: We have to build a lot of new nuclear weapons here because the nuclear weapons we have--dealing with the degradation of the pits and other things--we are not going to be able to have confidence they even work. So here is what the JASON says: JASON finds no evidence that accumulation of changes incurred from aging and LEPs-- Life extension programs-- have increased risk to certification of today's deployed nuclear warheads. They are saying, quite clearly, there is no evidence there is an increased risk to be able to certify that our nuclear stockpile is reliable. Lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in [the life extension programs] to date. So to those who want to go off and spend a lot of money building new nuclear weapons, at a time when we are deep in debt, and leverage that in exchange for voting on the START treaty, I say you are wrong. You are just dead wrong. We have to get about the business of reducing nuclear weapons. We have to get about the business of agreeing to treaties like this because it is our responsibility. It falls on our shoulders here in the United States to be the world leader to steer us away from nuclear catastrophe. Now, I understand nobody is talking about disarmament here. But we are talking about a circumstance where there is able to be certification that our nuclear stockpile is reliable. That certainly ought to satisfy the appetite of those who want to build more nuclear weapons. We should not be building more nuclear weapons. What kind of a message does that send to the rest of the world? We have 25,000 nuclear weapons on the planet already--the loss of one which caused an apoplectic seizure around this place, for those who knew it, because they wondered what would happen. Mr. President, 9/11 was several thousand people. What would happen if several hundred thousand people were murdered with a nuclear weapon being exploded in a major city--and not just a U.S. city, any major city on this planet? It will dramatically alter life on this planet. So I just wanted to say, this START treaty--I commend the President: a job well done. This is a very good and important treaty for our country and for the world. I am going to be strongly supporting it. We will have sufficient resources--the President has seen to it-- sufficient resources for the life extension program to make sure our nuclear stockpile is reliable. This President has said, to his credit, that our job, our responsibility as a world leader is to provide leadership to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, to do everything that is necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue nations. Our job is to find ways to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this planet. The President of the United States hosted at the convention center here in Washington, DC, I think the largest gathering, perhaps, of its kind in history, of world leaders who came here to talk about securing loose nuclear materials and nuclear weapons. Some make light of that: Well, a little gathering; good for all them. No one should make light of that gathering. It was historic and unbelievably important. A very small amount of highly enriched uranium--the size of a 2-liter of soda in the store--is enough to build a nuclear weapon. The loose nuclear materials, highly enriched uranium and plutonium that is available around the world, must be gathered together and must be safeguarded and kept out of the hands of terrorist organizations. That is what this President was doing: cementing together the will and the agreement with other leaders from around the world to do that. That is unbelievably important. No one should make light of that and everyone should understand the historic importance of what this President has done. Finally, this START treaty, as I indicated, I think has much to be commended to this country, and this Senate ought not find itself in the kind of dispute it almost always has on everything these days. If there is anything this Senate ought to be able to agree upon, it is that it is our responsibility and in our interests--in our long-term survival interests--to find ways to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this planet, reduce delivery vehicles, and reach agreements with adversaries and potential adversaries so all of us understand that we cannot allow a nuclear weapon to fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. I commend the administration. I hope on a bipartisan basis we can give a very strong vote to the START treaty when the hearings are completed and when we have a debate on it on the floor of the Senate. Mr. President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, first, I wish to make a couple comments about what has just transpired on the floor of the Senate. For the third time, we had a vote, not on anything relating to the ingredients of a bill dealing with financial reform or Wall Street reform, just on the question of the motion to proceed to debate the bill. Just the motion to proceed, yes or no, shall we proceed to bring the bill to the floor and debate it? For the third day in a row, all the members of the minority voted, no, we will not even allow the Senate to proceed to debate Wall Street reform. It is unbelievable to me. In the shadow of yesterday's hearings, with one of the major investment banks of this country and the disclosure of e-mails deep from the bowels of that bank that clearly suggested they were peddling securities to clients and customers that they knew to be bad securities and also betting against the position of their clients, betting against a recovery for our country--in the shadow of all that, how on Earth can the minority decide we should not even move to debate Wall Street reform? I find it interesting we have people saying government cannot solve this. There is too much government, too much this, too much that. When we had suffered a Great Depression in this country, it was the Federal Government that took action to put in place some things to try to protect our country's economy and did so for about 60 or 70 years. They said: We are not going to allow banks and FDIC-insured banks and investment banks and securities dealers and others to commingle under one corporation. We are not going to take banks and put risky enterprises fused to those banks. It doesn't make any sense. So legislation was passed to protect this country. About 10 years ago, there were a bunch of smart people who decided that stuff is old-fashioned. We have to compete with the Europeans, let's allow holding companies to be created, and we will bring banks and investment banks and real estate and all these things together into one big holding company, under one roof. It will be fine. It turns out it was not fine. At the same time this was happening, big holding companies now being created in which you brought risky things in the middle of banking enterprises whose very perception of safety and soundness is critical to their future--at the very same time that was happening, we had a bunch of people come to town who were supposed to be regulators, the referees, who said: You know what. We are going to be willfully blind. We are not going to regulate. We don't even like government. So do what you want. We will not watch, we will not look. At the same time that was going on, Alan Greenspan, at the Federal Reserve Board, decided we will let all these institutions behave in their own self-interest, and their self-interest will be what governs what will be the right thing. He now says that was a huge mistake. Yes, I guess so, probably a $15 trillion mistake. But the fact is, those who were supposed to be regulating and decided not to regulate, those who were supposed to be the referees to call the fouls, wear the striped shirts, blow the whistle, call the fouls when the free market system was being abused, were not around. They were out to lunch someplace for years and years and years. My colleagues who say, well, we do not want government to do this-- look, I do not know who else is going to set the rules here to decide we are not going to let this happen again. Does it take any amount of intelligence to understand a mortgage company advertising to people in the following way: Do you have no credit? Slow credit? No pay? Bankrupt? Come to us. We would like to give you a loan. On the floor of the Senate, I have shown solicitation after solicitation by companies that said: If you have got bad credit, slow pay, no pay, come to us. We would like to give you a home loan. It does not take a lot of intelligence to understand that does not work. And by the way, they also said: If you have got bad credit, come to us. In fact, we will not even ask you what your income is. We will give you a no-document loan. You do not have to document your income. It is called a no doc. By the way, we will give you a liar's loan. They do not call it that, but a no-doc is a liar's loan. It does not take a genius to understand that is not working very well. But why was everyone anxious to do all of that? Because you could wrap it into a big fat security. Then you could sell it to an investment bank. They could sell it to a hedge fund. They could sell it back again. And, meanwhile, whoever made the original loan got rid of the liability once they sold it upstream. They got the rating agencies to rate these things as triple A. Incidentally, conveniently, the rating agencies are paid by the very companies whose securities they rate. Sounds like trouble to me. So all of these things were happening, and everybody understands that is not going to hold up. Ultimately all of this is going to collapse. It is a house of cards that is being built. So how do you put this back together? Well, Senator Dodd and the Banking Committee put a bill together. That is the bill we are trying to get to the floor of the Senate. I think it is a pretty good bill. It tightens things up. It gives authorities to regulators they are going to need and will try to prevent this from ever happening again. This was not some Hurricane Katrina that came ashore and flattened a bunch of buildings. This was not a volcano erupting. This was not a tornado that came sweeping through and destroyed the town. This was an economic catastrophe that took away $15 trillion from this country. It devastated a lot of families, put a lot of people out of work, a lot of people out of their homes, and in the meantime we see what has happened. And while there are substantial amounts of misery around this country for families and people who have still not recovered from the devastation of this financial near collapse, the folks at the top are now making record profits. Yes, the investment bank that testified yesterday, record profits, big bonuses. I described earlier bonuses of $142 billion were projected on Wall Street. I talked about in the year 2008, at a point when this all began to collapse, we had something like $36 billion in losses just on Wall Street. And those firms that had $36 billion of losses paid $17 billion in bonuses to their employees. I have an MBA and went to business school. There is not any book that teaches that in business school: Lose a ton of money and get big bonuses. Yet that is what has been happening. It is a carnival of greed at the top. By the way, the instruments they created with these mortgage securities and others, securitizing almost anything they could get their hands on, with exotic titles such as credit default swaps--credit default swaps. We have always known about derivatives. I wrote an article which was the cover story for the ``Washington Monthly'' magazine in 1994. That is almost 16 years ago. My cover story for that magazine was titled ``Very Risky Business.'' It was about the danger that derivatives posed to the banking system. That is almost 16 years ago now. I made the same point in the year 1999 when Glass-Steagall was repealed, and I opposed it. Very risky business. So they create synthetic credit default swaps. Synthetic would be the same as calling it naked credit default swaps. That means, instead of having something at either end of a contract, there is nothing. It is two people making a wager or a bet that something else will happen. I happen to think there ought not be what is called a naked credit default swap. I think they ought to be outlawed. That is gambling. That is not investing. That is betting. If you want to bet, there are plenty of places to bet in this country, starting with Las Vegas and Atlantic City. They have a business doing that. No one ought to show up on an airplane in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, however, with their depositors' money or with their clients' money and decide that is what they are going to wager on a craps table or a keno table. Yet that is exactly what has been happening with what are called naked credit default swaps. One study I have seen suggests that of the credit default swaps in England, and I suspect it would hold true here, 80 percent of them had no insurable value on the other side. I would not be allowed today, this afternoon, to decide I am going to buy an insurance policy on the house of the Presiding Officer in North Carolina. It would be illegal for me to say my interest today is to invest in fire insurance on the Presiding Officer's home, because I have no insurable interest in that home. And it might be that I would buy fire insurance, if I could, and walk around with a box of matches. That is a problem. Right? So I have no insurable interest. It would be against the law for me to buy fire insurance on the home of the Presiding Officer. That is not the case with respect to naked credit default swaps. You do not have to have an insurable interest in anything. You, with someone else, say let's make a wager here on what is going to happen to this bond. There is an investment bank. Perhaps the investment bank will take part of that wager. They will certainly want to arrange it because they get great big fat fees. That is not investing in America. That is not making loans to small and medium-sized businesses. That is not investing in America's future and strength; that is gambling. And that is what we have come to. You cannot, in a country such as ours, expand our economy without two things: production and finance. There have been, over 200 years, times when production has the upper hand and when finance has the upper hand. We have been through a period here in the last couple of decades where the financing system of our country has the upper hand. We need a banking system, we need a financing system, with all of the levels of finance. Yes, FDIC-insured banks. Yes, investment banks, venture capital. We need all of those things. But we need to get back to the basics of the old-fashioned standard of what banking should and used to be; that is, taking deposits and then making loans. When you make a loan, you do what is called underwriting; that is, you sit across the desk from someone who needs a loan, and you look them in the eye and you evaluate: What is their income? What is their idea; their need; their property; and you decide, yes or no. There has been no underwriting on many of those loans that helped create this foundation of sand in this economy. There was no underwriting. Because if you could say to someone: You know what, we will give you a new home mortgage and you do not have to pay any interest, and you do not have to pay any principal, even, and you do not have to tell us what your income is--that is a no-doc liar's loan--we will do that for you. Why would someone do that? Because they are not going to have any risk. The minute they do it, they get it wrapped into a fat security and sell it to someone else. And because the rating agencies think all of these things are triple A, whoever else bought it thought it was a safe security, and then they sold it again and again and again. You passed the risk forward. This was a cesspool of greed with a lot of people making a lot of money and creating a structure that was destined to fall. The question is: Are we going to do something about that? Is somebody going to take some action to say that you cannot do that any more? That is what the Senator from Connecticut asks with a bill coming from the Banking Committee. The fact is, he brought that bill out of the Banking Committee, and not one Republican offered an amendment. Not one. They said, we are not going to participate. After they had had hearings for a year, and the Senator from Connecticut had negotiated with them for 5, 6 months, following all of that, they had a markup on a bill to write the bill, and the Republicans said, we are not going to participate. We will not offer any suggestions, no amendments. Then when the bill is now brought to the floor of the Senate, the Republicans say: Well, we were not part of it. Well, sure, they decided they did not want to be part of it, and that is why they were not part of it. That was an action they took. They say: Well, we believe this is a bailout bill. It is not a bailout bill. I will tell them what a bailout bill is. I voted against it. A bailout bill was when George W. Bush and his Treasury Secretary came to the Congress and said: I want you to pass a three-page bill in the next 3 days, putting up $700 billion to bail out America's biggest financial firms. Yes, that was a bailout bill. And most of those who called this a bailout bill voted for that. They know what a bailout is because they voted for it. I did not. But, nonetheless, this is not a bailout bill. This is a bill that finally begins to shut the door on activities that should never have been taking place. Is the bill perfect? No. Should it be changed? There are a number of areas where I think it will be changed once it gets to the floor. But you cannot even address those unless you get past the motion to proceed. What the minority is doing is saying, we do not intend to let you proceed at all. Well, how about deciding that we are going to do this together and we will get the best of what both political parties have to offer, get the best amendments that can be offered. I have suggested one; that is, naked credit default swaps. If you have no insurable interest, ban them. Mr. Pearlstein, who writes a column for the Washington Post, made a suggestion that makes a lot of sense to me. Why would you allow more securities in the form of credit default swaps to insure bonds? Why would you allow more of them than there are bonds to insure? Well, the answer is obvious, because that is gambling above that level. It is very much like about a year and a half ago when the price of oil, or almost 2 years ago, the price of oil went to $147 a barrel in day trading, and I made the point on the floor: There was 20 times more oil bought and sold each day than there was produced each day--an unbelievable orgy of speculation in the oil market. Nearly broke that market. Well, it finally came back down and the people who made the money on the upside also made money on the downside. But, you know, that is what has been happening in this country now for too long. The bill that should come to the floor of the Senate--and my hope is that perhaps the next vote will have a couple of folks on the other side who agree with us, let us bring a bill to the Senate, let us address these issues that caused this unbelievable avalanche of greed on Wall Street and elsewhere, and let us tighten the reins so this cannot happen again. Do we want to continue the practice? I showed yesterday on the floor of the Senate I think four examples of companies that are still advertising: Do you have bad credit? Come to us. We will give you a loan. Do you have no credit? Slow pay? Come to us, we will give you a loan. Okay. Are you bankrupt? Come to us, we will give you a loan. It is still going on. All of this is about securitizing everything and everybody making big fees and being paid big bonuses. There is a smarter way to do financing and banking in this country. We have watched it work for decades, and it has gotten far afield in the past decade or two. We need to pull it back in and say, that is not what our country is about. The free market system is the best allocator of goods and services that I am aware of, but it is not perfect. Sometimes there are fouls in the free market system. Sometimes people try to manipulate it and do so successfully. That is why you need a referee and that is why you need effective regulations that work. That is what the bill is about. Put together those effective regulations that work. Prevent this kind of economic collapse from happening again. This is not just some academic exercise. There are somewhere around 16 to 17 million people today in this country who woke up this morning and they are jobless and do not have any work. Some of them not only feel jobless, but they feel helpless and hopeless because they cannot find work. Some of them, by the way, have not only lost their jobs, they have lost their homes. This is a very deep recession we have been in, and it has caused unbelievable pain across this country. But not for everybody. Because once again, some of the largest financial institutions in this country are now showing record profits and paying record bonuses. The question is, are they doing that because they are making loans out there to businesses that are ready to recover and to expand? No. The answer is, unfortunately, no. Once again they are trading securities back and forth, exchanging fees, securitizing virtually everything. There is a much better way to do financing and banking in this country that will strengthen the future of this country. I want to get at the business of getting this bill to the floor, having the minority stop blocking us, and begin offering amendments so we can get the best of what both parties have to offer. It has been a long time since we have had that sort of thing happen on the floor of the Senate. I was hoping that if there is one thing that might galvanize some bipartisanship in this body, it might be an understanding of the unbelievably excruciating pain the American people have felt as a result of the deepest recession since the Great Depression and perhaps an understanding that the American people demand that this Congress stand up and do something about it, to try to do the things that plug the holes and shut the gates and prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again. I guess that was too much to hope for, at least until now, on Wednesday. We will have an opportunity on Thursday and Friday, perhaps, and I hope perhaps we can get one or two people who agree with us to say: Yes, let's bring this to the floor, have it wide open for amendments, offer amendments, debate amendments, and do what is necessary for the people. I know the biggest financial institutions have some big disagreements with this bill, but I have some big disagreements with them. I think what has gone on is pretty unbelievable. They have a role to play in this country's future going ahead, but it is not a role I consider betting; it is a role I consider to be investing. If they want to continue to simply make wagers about America and about securities, that is not the financing system we have known and grown to believe is important for this country's future. I know there is a lot of disappointment after this last vote. My hope is there will be some who continue to think and rethink. Is this what my constituents want? Do they want me to decide to block even the opportunity to address these unbelievable gaping holes in our financing structure that allowed this country to be steered right into the ditch, the biggest economic wreck in 70 years? I think they would understand that is not what citizens and their constituents want for the future. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 15 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, change is very hard in this country and in this Chamber. Change is always hard. I was thinking, as we have been blocked from proceeding on the Wall Street reform bill, which is a very important issue, about what probably was the case on another big change at the turn of the last century, when Upton Sinclair wrote about the meatpacking houses in this country. He wrote a book called ``The Jungle'' and described his visit to the meatpacking houses in Chicago and the unbelievably unsanitary conditions in those meatpacking houses--rats all around those meatpacking houses. But that was all right because they poisoned the rats. They took loaves of bread and soaked them in poison, laid them around and then there were dead rats and all the other things that existed in those meatpacking houses that went down the same chute, and out the back side came meat right to the grocery store and to the American people, an unsuspecting public--the most unsanitary conditions in the world. As a result of publishing the book, ``The Jungle,'' there was a public outcry demanding that something be done. The Congress finally, at last, at long last, beat back the opposition of a very strong meatpacking industry and passed safe food laws, creating the Food and Drug Administration. Change is so very hard. But people knew then something had to be done about that, and the American people know now something has to be done about this. It is interesting to hear people come to the floor of the Senate and say: Well, we are blocking a motion to proceed to go to a Wall Street reform bill because we want to make it better. Does anybody really believe that? They want to weaken it. They do not even want it in the first place, to the extent they can avoid it. That is why they didn't do anything in the committee. There were negotiations for weeks in the Banking Committee. I was not there, but I am told by all involved there were negotiations for weeks in the Banking Committee. Then they had a markup, and the Republicans didn't offer one suggestion. If they have a whole backpack full of suggestions on how to improve the bill, why was there not one amendment offered in the committee? So now we have the spectacle of the desperate need for reforming Wall Street finance in this country and the entire Republican caucus in the Senate votes no--every single one of them. Well, let me describe what we are facing, if I might. This economic collapse is not a stranger to most Americans. Somewhere around 15 or 16 million got out of bed this morning jobless, looking for work and can't find work. They understand the cost of this economic collapse. Here is what it has cost the taxpayer. By the way, we don't have all these numbers. This was from an enterprising reporter at Bloomberg who did good work. But the Federal Reserve bailout commitment, $7.8 trillion; FDIC, $2 trillion; Treasury, $2.7 trillion; HUD, $300 billion--that is $12.8 trillion, think about that, the amount of money lent, spent or committed on behalf of the American taxpayer to try to get out of this deep hole. Even as we found ourselves in this deep hole--here, by the way, is what has happened to the biggest financial institutions in the country. Going back 10 years ago, the Congress decided--in my judgment without any wisdom at all because I voted against it--to say let's homogenize all our big financial institutions. Congress said let's put them all in one big basket, investment banks, FDIC-insured banks, real estate, securities, throw them all into one big old holding company and things will be great. It will allow us to compete with the Europeans and others much better. They created these giant houses of cards. This is what happened the largest financial institutions in the country got bigger and bigger. In fact, that is what has happened even during this collapse. Even in the greatest recession since the Great Depression they have continued to grow. Let me again describe some of the origin of this, this cesspool of greed that has existed in recent years, resulting in one person--I have talked about him in the past--making $3.6 billion in just one year, betting against America, selling short. By the way, if you are wondering, that is $300 million a month or, if this person's spouse asks: How are we doing, sweetheart, he can say we made $10 million a day every single day. This is on the Internet right now and this is the origin of all this greed. It goes up from here, to a security, to a hedge fund, to an investment bank, and they are all making obscene profits right on up through the collapse. By the way, they are doing it again today. This is on the Internet. This is a company called EasyLoanForYou: Get the loan you seek fast and hassle-free. Our lenders will approve your loan immediately regardless of your credit score or history. You need a loan? It doesn't matter how bad your credit is. Here is one on the Internet. SpeedyBadCreditLoans. It says: Bad credit, no problem. No credit, no problem. How about bankruptcy? That is not a problem either. Come to us, ``Get a guaranteed bad credit personal loan today.'' Yes, this is on the Internet today. Bad Credit Personal Loans, ``a Christian Faith Based Service.'' Previous bankruptcy? That is all right. No credit, bad credit, recent divorce, need more money? No problem. This is the origin of what was going on in this country and it is still going on. By the way, you don't have to make interest payments or principal payments for the first 12 months, we will make them for you, and you don't have to document your income to us. We wallpapered this country with this sort of nonsense, fundamentally ignorant banking practices, and then turned them into securities and sold them up, up, up the chain. The fact is, everybody was making big fees. The rating companies were with their pom-poms, approving everything with AAA. Meanwhile, they were creating an entire house of cards. Unbelievable. Today, there is a hearing going on and one of the largest investment banks is under siege at that hearing because our friend, Senator Carl Levin, actually has the goods. He has the memos, the internal memos. He subpoenaed them. It shows that investment banking company is making record profits now but actually was betting against its customers, was actually selling short, betting against the American economy. So the question is, When all that was going sour and the American taxpayers were told these companies that are doing that are too big to fail, that we have a moral hazard here, we have systemic risk with grave consequences to this economy and therefore the American taxpayer has to be told you bail them out. The Federal Reserve, on behalf of the American taxpayer, decides we are going to provide unlimited funding and unlimited money and a new loan window for the first time in history to investment banks. Then we go to the Fed and say: How much did you actually put out there? And they say: You have no business knowing. We don't intend to tell you, and we don't intend to tell the American people. That is where we find ourselves right now. It is unbelievable. There is an old country saying: The water is not going to clear up until you get the hogs out of the creek. This issue we are trying to get to the floor of the Senate on a motion to proceed so we can actually do Wall Street reform is all about getting the hogs out of the creek. But we will vote again today at 4:30--I believe it is 4:30. We voted yesterday. We will vote, I suppose, tomorrow. Every single Republican has said we don't intend to even allow you to proceed because we want to strengthen the bill. Really? When two of the top Republicans go to Wall Street about 19 days ago to meet with two dozen Wall Street executives in a closed session and then come back and say we are going to stop Wall Street reform because we want to strengthen it--I don't think so. It doesn't sound to me like that is the case. If you want to strengthen it, I say to my colleagues--you say it is not strong enough in too big to fail--I am going to be offering an amendment on ending too big to fail. But you can't offer an amendment unless you get the motion to proceed to get the bill on the floor. But I am wondering how many Republican votes I will get for an amendment that says if you are too big to fail, if you pose a moral hazard, systemic risk with grave consequences to our economy, it seems to me we should back you away through divestitures to a point where you are not causing that moral hazard, if that is the case. Those who say they are trying to strengthen this bill--and I doubt it--I wonder if they will join me on that. They come to the floor and say: We haven't had a chance to negotiate or discuss this, when, in fact, there were negotiations for months in the Senate Banking Committee, and before that there were hearings that went on for a year in the Senate Banking Committee. When they finally got to the point of writing the bill, the Republicans decided we don't have one suggestion for an amendment, not one, not any. Now they are saying: We are going to take a stand. We are not going to even allow the Senate to consider Wall Street reform because we think it needs to be improved. Oh, really? I think they think it is too strong. I think they have a lot of friends who want them to weaken it. That is my belief. The question is, Will we be able to see, at some point, perhaps at long last, the other side stop making excuses and allow us to begin legislating? Is there any American who has suffered the consequences of this deep decline in our economy, the deepest decline since the Great Depression--is there any American who says: You know what. Hands off the big investment banks. Hands off the big finance companies. Yes, we know they were trading things we don't understand. They were trading things such as credit default swaps that were naked. I asked the other day: How did that get naked? A credit default swap that is naked means it has no insurable interest in any case on either side. It is not investing, it is simply waging. I said before: Why pretend? Why not put a keno pit or a craps table in the lobby of those institutions because all it is, is making wagers or bets. We have a couple of very large communities and many other areas of America where you can do that, Las Vegas and Atlantic City. But in the last decade, and especially with the growth of these unbelievably exotic instruments, we have seen that happening increasingly in the lobbies of some of America's biggest financial institutions because they have decided, if they bet and lose, at least the record is the American taxpayer going to be standing behind them to pick up the tab. No more. The legislation brought to us by Senator Dodd and Senator Lincoln dealing with financial reform and derivatives is not perfect. Senator Dodd is on the floor. He would be the first to say that. But none of us can offer any amendments unless we have a motion to proceed to get to the bill. I think the work done by Senator Dodd and the Banking Committee is work that needs to be commended. It stretches my imagination, and I think others', for the excuse for voting against the motion to proceed to allow us to get to the floor on this and actually have a debate and offer amendments, to allow as an excuse that the other side truly wants to strengthen this. You know what. We are going to get to the bill at some point, somehow, over the opposition of a determined minority that wants to protect Wall Street's interests here. Even as we are holding these hearings today and discovering some pretty pathetic behavior on behalf of some big economic players, we are going to get to this bill. When we do, we will see who is on the floor of the Senate on the side of the American people. We will see who truly wants Wall Street reform that does the right thing. There are many things we need to do. Let me just say I mentioned too big to fail--I am going to introduce an amendment that bans naked credit default swaps that have no insurable interest. Again, that is betting, not investing. So there are a lot of things for us to do, but we cannot even begin to do that until we get a motion to proceed, and we would expect, perhaps even by accident, we would get one vote or perhaps two votes on the other side. We will see. Maybe this afternoon will be the time. The American people deserve much better. As I said when I started, I know that change is hard and big change is exceedingly hard. But this is a big issue. This isn't some small potatoes. This is trillions and trillions of dollars. The American people lost $15 trillion in wealth when the economy hit rock bottom. So they require us, they demand of this Congress to take action--not to take action just for the sake of having done something but to take action for the sake of fixing this, to make sure this sort of nonsense and behavior cannot ever happen again in a way that threatens this country's economy. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 2:15 p.m. in Room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a legislative hearing on the following bills: S. 2802, A bill to settle land claims within the Fort Hall Reservation; S. 1264, A bill to require the Secretary of the Interior to assess the irrigation infrastructure of the Pine River Indian Irrigation Project in the State of Colorado and provide grants to, and enter into cooperative agreements with, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe to assess, repair, rehabilitate, or reconstruct existing infrastructure, and for other purposes; and S. 439, A bill to provide for and promote the economic development of Indian tribes by furnishing the necessary capital, financial services, and technical assistance to Indian-owned business enterprises, to stimulate the development of the private sector of Indian tribal economies, and for other purposes. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 496, submitted earlier today.