President Obama told the traveling press pool aboard Air Force One yesterday that he’s “very pleased that the United States Senate has decided to proceed to the financial regulatory bill.”
“It is the right thing to do,” the president said. “And I want to reiterate what I said earlier, that this shouldn’t have to be a partisan issue. Republicans, Democrats, independents — everybody was hurt by the crisis on Wall Street.”
It is something that we can prevent with some better rules of the road, and I hope that we can get this done quickly, reconcile it with the work that was done over on the House side, and that I can sign this bill into law very soon. But I want to congratulate the Senate on making progress on an issue that’s vital to everybody in the country.
Obama was also asked about the Goldman Sachs executives who testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
I will say that I think most Americans would say that some of the behavior generally on Wall Street, even if it’s legal, doesn’t seem to serve much of an economic purpose and puts, as we’ve discovered, the entire economy at risk, and that the more that we get — make sure there’s transparency, openness, clarity about how the financial system is working; the more that we have, for example, higher capital requirements, less leverage in the system — it may be a little boring and may reduce bonuses for some of the players on Wall Street, but we’ll end up having a safer, more secure financial system, and I think banks and other financial institutions can get back to making money the old-fashioned way, which is by lending it to companies to build businesses and create jobs and do all the things that we want our financial system to do.
