WPCNR QUILL & EYESHADE. From Senator Hillary Clinton's Press Office. October 7, 2008: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today called on the Treasury Department to aid small businesses, universities, students and municipalities already feeling the damaging effects of the credit crisis. In a letter to President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Senator Clinton said the recently enacted market rescue plan might not work quickly enough to prevent additional job losses, tuition increases, and other economic challenges from hitting Main Street, and should be supplemented by immediate action to inject more short-term liquidity into the credit market.
“This would be an extraordinary undertaking, but we must take every step to ensure that this market crisis, which is now global, does not threaten to seize our entire economy,” Senator Clinton wrote. “It is a matter of necessity and a matter of fairness: we are helping to keep large Wall Street firms afloat with lines of credit and we should do the same for small Main Street businesses.”
Senator Clinton urged the administration to set aside $150 billion of the $700 billion rescue plan for an “Emergency Stabilization Fund” to make emergency loans and establish temporary lines of credit for small businesses, to allow schools and universities to have short term access to funding to reduce the pressure on tuition, to increase direct loans to students as private lending has dried up, and to help stabilize municipal bonds. Senator Clinton has also proposed dedicating $100 billion in new Treasury Security revenues to this effort to take advantage of the historically low Treasury bill yields.
Yesterday, Senator Clinton joined small business leaders and community advocates in New York to highlight the impact of the growing economic crisis on Main Street. Last week, Senator Clinton called for action to help New Yorkers who have lost or are at risk of losing their jobs. Senator Clinton also spoke on the floor of the Senate and laid out goals for further action to address the underlying causes of the current crisis. She proposed specific steps to protect taxpayers, ensure transparency and accountability, aid homeowners facing foreclosure, and pursue broad economic reforms. For more information on Senator Clinton’s work on this issue, see: http://clinton.senate.gov/issues/housing/subprime.
The text of Senator Clinton’s letter to President Bush and Secretary Paulson follows and is available in PDF here: http://www.clinton.senate.gov/documents/news/10_07_08_bush.pdf.
