If you must you can add the following, but focus on the context: Our purpose here is to win elections, not to educate everybody about everything:
| "The reasons for [the financial sector problems] are not obscured. There are several of them. "One of them is that the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan kept the punch bowl open for a long time with [unusually low] loan interest rates after 9-11, which led to a wild borrowing spree on Wall Street and Main Street. "Secondly, for two decades you've had Republicans and Democrats in the Presidency and also in Congress who "And thirdly, what we had was a kind of advance in computers in which people derived these esoteric instruments of debt, which was understood, not as a way to cheat and hide, but as a way to spread the risk of mortgages. But ultimately, because it was [so] obscure, it had the opposite effect of spreading the liability in a way that people aren't even sure how much they own. "The reason Lehman collapsed is because it looked at its books and doesn't understand how much of a liability it has, and a run starts on it, and it can't answer. "Both are appealing mindlessly to populism [blaming Republicans or Wall Street instead of the politicians who started the whole mess when, for years and years, so many of those politicians had the government coerce the financial sector into selling all those risky mortgages]." -- Charles Krauthammer on Special Report with Brit Hume, Sept. 18, 2008 |
Stick to your guns. This wasn't Wall Street's fault.