“Within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.”

“…Here’s the facts, we don’t even talk about these things. On Thursday about 11:00 in the morning the Federal Reserve noticed the tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States to the tune of $550 billion dollars….were being drawn out in matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up it’s window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks.”

“They decided to close the operation, closed down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there. That’s what actually happened.”

If they had not done that, their estimations was that by 2:00 that afternoon five and a half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States…would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.

“Now we talked at that time what would have happened if that had happened? It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it and that’s why when they made the point, “we’ve got to act and do things quickly,” we did.”

“Now Secretary Paulson said let’s buy out the sub-prime mortgages. That’s when he came to Congress but he said, “give us latitude and large authority to do many things (as we decide necessary) and give us $700 billion dollars to do that.””

“Shortly after we enacted our bill with though very broad powers. The UK came out and said “NO”, “We don’t have enough money to buy toxic assets.” “We’re instead giving our money to banks so their equity grows and their not bankrupt. And so it…er…the UK started that process and that’s true. It was much cheaper to put more money in banks as equity investments than to start buying their bad assets because it became early determined that we’d have to spend 3 or 4 trillion dollars of taxpayer’s money to buy these bad assets. And we didn’t have…er…we only had 700 billion dollars.”

“So Paulson made a complete switch, went in and started putting money into buying securities and re-investing in the banks of the United States.”

“Why? Because if you don’t have a banking system you don’t have an economy and although we did that it wasn’t enough money and as fast as we did that the economy has been falling and the reason last week we’re really not better off today than we were three months ago. Because we’ve had a decrease in the equity positions of banks. Because other assets are going sour by the moment.”

“Now we’ve gotta make some decisions. Do we pour more money in? To what extent? That money might go in? I, myself think we ought to take the time and analyze where we are, have the people understand.”

“When you listen to the lady who just got off the telephone she is near panic and she doesn’t think her government is acting properly or acting in her behalf.”

“I think it’s important that we start informing that lady as to what really were the facts, what happened and get input from her. Maybe she has a better idea. You know we’re not any geniuses in economics or finances anyway. We’re Representatives of the people. We ought to take our time but let the people know this is a very difficult struggle.”

“Somebody threw is iin the middle of the Atlantic Ocean without a life raft and we’re trying to determine which is the closest shore and if there is any chance in the world to swim that far.”

“We don’t know…”