Recovered from FSRN’s earlier site via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The audio here is FSRN’s own production recording. Originally published September 14, 2009.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of collapse of Lehman Brothers, which along with the breakdown of other major financial institutions created what many call "The Great Recession." Speaking today at Federal Hall on Wall Street, President Obama said that Americans lost $5 trillion of household wealth in a matter of three months.
" . . . it wasn't just a failure of oversight or foresight. It was also a failure of responsibility. It was fundamentally a failure of responsibility that allowed Washington to become a place where problems, including structural problems in our financial system, were ignored rather than solved. It was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take reckless risks that they couldn't afford to take. It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street and across America that led to the near-collapse of our financial system one year ago."
The President urged Congress to enact a series of reforms, including establishing a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, closing loopholes that allow for systemic abuse of the financial regulatory system and fixing what is broken in the global financial system. Obama also had a stern message for his audience at Federal Hall and the recipients of the multi-billion dollar bailouts.
"It is neither right nor responsible after you've recovered with the help of your government to shirk your obligation to the goal of wider recovery, a more stable system and a more broadly shared prosperity. So I want to urge you to demonstrate that you take this obligation to heart. To put greater effort into helping families who need their mortgages modified under my administration's homeownership plan. To help small business owners who desperately need loans and who are bearing the brunt of the decline in available credit. To help communities that would benefit from the financing you could provide, or the community development institutions you could support."
Obama said banks have repaid an estimated $70 billion of bailout funds and the government has eliminated $250 billion reserved in the budget for additional bailouts.
