House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said financial market turmoil is likely to force Congress and the administration to consider whether the U.S. government should buy distressed debt and mortgages.
The ``next question'' for lawmakers and the Bush administration will be whether Congress should create an agency like the Resolution Trust Corp., which took over the assets of failed savings and loan associations almost two decades ago, Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, told reporters in Washington.
Market volatility in the wake of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy filing yesterday raises the question of whether direct government intervention is needed to ``deal with all the bad paper out there'' and get financial markets ``out of the box,'' Frank said.
