MSNBC Interview With Rep. Jim Himes - Transcript

Interview

Subject: The 111th Congress Interviewers: Carlos Watson, Andy Serwer

Copyright ©2009 by Federal News Service, Inc., Ste. 500, 1000 Vermont Ave, Washington, DC 20005 USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted without the written authority of Federal News Service, Inc. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by a United States government officer or employee as a part of that person's official duties. For information on subscribing to the FNS Internet Service at www.fednews.com, please email Carina Nyberg at cnyberg@fednews.com or call 1-202-216-2706.

MR. WATSON: Would you tell me a little bit about your early road?

REP. HIMES: Sure. Sure. Well, I was actually born in Latin America. I was born in Peru. I spent the first ten years of my life living down there, and you know, so I had a little taste of some countries that as nice as they were, don't begin to offer the kind of opportunity that when I came back to this country at age ten was offered to me. You know, my parents split up. My mom brought me up in a single, working mom household and, you know, I got to go to a good public school, and frankly, I think back to that moment and while we are putting out this economic fire down here, I never forget the urgency around education and fixing these kinds of things that we call the American dream are so, so important because they were there for me.

MR. WATSON: Congressman, tell me about your decision to run for office in the first place, again, you had a ton of success at Goldman Sachs, you were VP. Presumably, you were making more than you're making as a member of Congress and Chris Shays had been in office a long time. What made you decide to make the leap?

REP. HIMES: Well, there was actually about five years between when I left Wall Street and when I decided to run for Congress. I was actually running a wonderful, affordable housing non-profit organization in New York City called Enterprise Community Partners, working with banks and others to try to build good, vibrant economic communities in some of our most distressed areas, and frankly, that had a lot to do with my decision. You know, just seeing how we can put in place measures to generate economic vitality if we're smart about it, you know, if we set aside the partisanship and put in place good policies that encourage small businesses, that encourage our cities to become engines of economic vibrancy, we can get this right.

And so, you know, that in a sense, also, most of my grandparents were Republicans and I have a profound respect for the values that that party used to be about, individual liberty, environmentalism, fiscal responsibility. But I sensed about eight years ago, no coincidence, that that party was stepping away from some of those fundamental values and I said, hey, I'm going to step in and try to get us back to something that I think is more reasonable.

MR. WATSON: Congressman Himes, Andy Serwer is my guest co-host today and he's obviously the managing editor of Fortune magazine and he's got a question for you.

REP. HIMES: Sure.

MR. SERWER: Congressman, nice to see you. We were just talking to one of your senior colleagues, Barney Frank, and he was talking about the regulatory environment and suggesting perhaps that there will be a council of regulators to oversee the financial markets.

Does that make sense to you? Or does that sound like just another layer of regulation? Are you going to get rid of some regulators and add this? Or are we just going to see more and more regulation?

REP. HIMES: Well, we're not going to see more and more regulation. We are, on the one hand, going to see a whole bunch of new attention paid to the question of systemic risk, I mean, you know, as much as we had a lot of regulation out there and you're looking at a guy who had spent all night, many nights working on SEC disclosure forms.

So I know that we are heavily regulated in certain areas. There wasn't really anybody watching the whole system and saying, hey, wait a minute, what happens here if AIG goes under? What happens if Lehman Brothers goes under? And should we do anything about it? That question wasn't being asked.

Now, to your question on a council. On the one hand, look, we need an entity in there thinking about this stuff without question and doing it very carefully, you know, this is not simple stuff. You're not going to have a systemic regulator look at Firm A and say, hey, you're systemically important because all of a sudden now that firm, by definition, is too big to fail, has a lower cost of capital and the economic consequences of that lower cost of capital.

So this is a technical thing. I think this is going to be a process of evolution. In a perfect world we'd wave a magic wand and rationalize, streamline the fact that we've got seven or eight disparate regulators out there. The reality is that's going to happen over time. But the first thing we need to do is to sort of get a really hard look at what could generate systemic risk so that we never, ever find ourselves in the position of having to put billions of dollars of taxpayer money on the table again.

MR. WATSON: Congressman Himes, I've only got 20 seconds, but surprise us a little bit, tell the people who are watching something they'd be surprised to learn about you.

REP. HIMES: Well, they might be surprised to learn that as hard as I'm working down here and dedicated as I feel and lucky as I feel to be part of working to kind of restabilize this economy. I'll tell you what as a dad of two girls, I've got a nine-year-old and a six- year-old at home, boy, do I feel a tug there and, you know, I'm proud of the service of my colleagues and the people who come down here to work hard, but behind each and every one of them is a mom or a dad or a sister or a brother who are saying, gosh, you know, as much as I like being here right now, I wish I could be a better father, I wish I could be a better mother.

It's a really challenging thing that people who come down here do.

MR. WATSON: Have your girls met Sasha and Malia yet or is that a ways off?

REP. HIMES: You know, they haven't met them, but one thing I will tell you is that it appears that the Himes household will soon be getting a dog and that is no coincidence. I can't say I'm entirely happy about that.

MR. WATSON: Congressman Himes, we have to go, but thank you so much for joining us, sir.

REP. HIMES: Thank you.

Source