Obama hails progress on financial reform

President Barack Obama congratulated the Senate for advancing the
financial reform bill after Republicans removed a three-day block on
the legislation.

Obama, talking to reporters aboard Air Force One, said the Senate movement “is the right thing to do.”

{mosads}”This
shouldn’t have to be a partisan issue,” Obama said. “Republicans,
Democrats, independents — everybody was hurt by the crisis on Wall
Street. It is something that we can prevent with some better rules of
the road, and I hope that we can get this done quickly, reconcile it
with the work that was done over on the House side, and that I can sign
this bill into law very soon.”

The president declined to comment on the congressional testimony of Goldman Sachs’s executives because it is a pending case.

He
did criticize some of the “behavior on Wall Street,” but he said new
rules would make sure “banks and other financial institutions can get
back to making money the old-fashioned way, which is by lending it to
companies to build businesses and create jobs and do all the things
that we want our financial system to do.”