Volunteer State News

NASHVILLE, TN—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking and Appropriations Committees, on may 15 joined Mornings with Maria on Fox Business to discuss ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, this week’s Senate Banking Committee Hearing, and the unprecedented crisis at the southern border that has become a catastrophe after the Biden Administration ended Title 42. 

Partial Transcript

Hagerty on spending cuts in a debt ceiling agreement: “All of those are imminently reasonable terms, Maria, and I think the American public supports all of those. If you think about it, the unspent covid funds should be a no-brainer. I mean, the COVID Pandemic, finally, even this Administration has admitted that it’s over, so those funds should come back. One of the things that I would’ve hoped to see on the table would be the unspent and unallocated debt relief funds, if you will. The student loan debt relief that [President Joe] Biden has provided that I think is unconstitutional—that most Americans think is totally inappropriate—that’s about $460 billion as well. I’d like to see it on the table.”

Hagerty on his legislation to relieve stress on the banking system: “You’ve got the too-big-to-fail banks that have a huge competitive advantage. What my bill does is [it] actually takes care of these wholesale accounts significantly. It takes it up to $100 million in terms of wholesale accounts. These are accounts that medium-sized businesses might have to manage their payrolls, etc. If those accounts lead banks, that’ll create significant pressure on the system; my bill actually addresses that. On the retail side, what it does is it allows these banks to go ahead and spread their accounts across—basically have reciprocal accounts with other banks—and it doesn’t require a raising of the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] limit there, but it allows more reciprocity, more flexibility. It also provides for more bank mergers, makes it easier. The [Federal Reserve] has not been doing a good job in terms of approving these in a timely fashion. When a bank is well-capitalized, if it’s well-situated, if banks are trying to merge, this makes it easier—it facilitates that process as well. What we have is a situation where in Washington, the system is sclerotic, very difficult to manage, and this will improve it dramatically.”

Hagerty on the FDIC’s special assessment of banks after the failed auction of SVB: “This is a very expensive process that the FDIC is managing. They’re going to impose a special assessment across banks in the American banking community. They’re in the process right now of deciding which banks are going to absorb this. They have assured me that the smaller community banks will not bear an undue burden here. I’m waiting to see how that unfolds, but I think every bank in America is concerned about the fact that the FDIC allowed the auction to fail, made it immensely costly to the American public. And this spreading of the burden, if you will, is going to impact American taxpayers because I fully expect that this cost is going to be passed right along to those customers of the banks that are going to be significantly impaired by this special assessment.”

Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s willingness to fund physical border security in other countries, but not in the United States: “Biden’s own nominees are acknowledging the fact that physical security works. In fact, they’re spending U.S. taxpayer dollars in foreign countries to create border security for those countries, and as this nominee [that I questioned] said, ‘to prevent drug smuggling,’ which is the biggest health threat that we have in America for people the ages 18 to 45, that’s the number one killer of Americans here in our country in that age group. And yet we’re not going to put any border security in place for America, yet we’re willing to fund it in Jordan.”

Hagerty on President Biden’s claim that the end of Title 42 is going better than expected: “It’s unbelievable because the expectations have been set so low. I mean, what we’ve seen is a massive flood of humanity coming across that border. It’s a crisis that you’ve covered better than anybody. But the drug smuggling that’s stepped up, the number of people that are dying here in America every day, thanks to fentanyl, is something that this Administration wants to ignore. Yet again, they’re willing to fund border security for a country like Jordan to prevent drug smuggling there. It’s amazing.”

Original source can be found here.