Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings

WASHINGTON — It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke,
laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial
crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a
stunned silence at first.
Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they
were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi.
“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.
As Senator Christopher J. Dodd,
Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban
Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good
Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re
literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial
system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”
Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”
When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut
in. “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have
never heard language like this.”
“What you heard last evening,” he added, “is one of those rare
moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and
Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly.”
Although Mr. Schumer, Mr. Dodd and other participants declined to
repeat precisely what they were told by Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson,
they said the two men described the financial system as effectively
bound in a knot that was being pulled tighter and tighter by the day.
“You have the credit lines in America, which are the lifeblood of
the economy, frozen.” Mr. Schumer said. “That hasn’t happened before.
It’s a brave new world. You are in uncharted territory, but the one
thing you do know is you can’t leave them frozen or the economy will
just head south at a rapid rate.”
FULL STORY
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/washington/19cnd-cong.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin