Nancy Pelosi on Getting the TARP Votes to Save the Economy

Sept. 18, 2008: Paulson meets with members of Congress to discuss TARP

Tell us about the evening Hank Paulson briefed you and others in Congress on the crisis.
I hadn’t heard from Paulson in a couple of weeks, and in that time we’d had Lehman, Merrill, and AIG. So I called and asked him to come the next day to meet not just with me but with our House Democratic leadership. When he called back he said, “Madam Speaker, tomorrow morning will be too late.” That evening he described the scenario from hell, a meltdown of such seriousness that Chairman Bernanke said, “If we don’t act immediately we will not have an economy by Monday.”