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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you listened to him describe it you gulped,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cGood Morning America,\u201d\u009d the congressional leaders were told \u201cthat we\u2019re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
I do not think many people realized just how serious the situation was on Wednesday and Thursday of this past week, and that Senator Dodd is not exaggerating (look for example at what happened to [url=http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/echarts?s=STT#chart1:symbol=stt;range=5d;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined”]State Street Bank[\/url]). [url=http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/09\/20\/washington\/19cnd-cong.html?hp]Read it all, and spare a prayer or two for the national leaders involved in all this–it matters[\/url][\/i].<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/span><\/p>\n