Bill Clinton Quotes

We gotta get Fannie and Freddie out of government ownership. It makes no sense that these are owned by the government and have been controlled by the government for as long as they have.

Fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in isolation, without looking at the big picture, would be short-sighted.

Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would destabilize the greatest economy in the world.

My constituents say, 'Congressman, have you balanced the budget?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, we're working on it.' And they are going to say, 'Well, Congressman, did you get rid of Fannie and Freddie?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, we're working on it.'

Between the Community Redevelopment Act, requiring banks to make what I would call very weak loans, and specific quotas that the Congress imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that created the market demand that really led to the subprime phenomenon.

I think we're not going to preserve Fannie and Freddie in anything like their current form. We're going to have to bring fundamental change to that market.

Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. That means reinstalling the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down in 1999.

Analysts say that one reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were privatized in the first place was to prevent political whims from dominating the mortgage marketplace.

Fannie and Freddie made two-thirds of all subprime mortgages. That is not a free market institution. That entity, along with the Fed printing too much money back in '03 and '04, caused the housing collapse. So we need to take free markets seriously. That means we have to put an end to all these tax credits and tax deductions and loopholes.

If President Barack Obama had not been in the White House, we would not have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today.

We need reform, but not at the hands of Wall Street.

Making choices is what the Presidency is about.

A democratic state too gentlemanly to learn all it can about threats us a state that betrayed its most fundamental responsibilities.

Dodd-Frank represents the greatest regulatory burden on our economy, more so than all the other Obama-era regulations combined.

The president, it seems to me, stands out as the one person in our system who is in a unique position where the checks on any lack of integrity there are more important than for anyone else in the system of government.

In politics, the leaders are supposed to work and work.

We have the idea of saying that put limitations on bailouts, so that the bailouts don't occur in the future, so that we don't have to do the - look to see AIG situations or Bear Stearns situations or the Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which is probably going to be more money spent on those two institutions than the Congress spent on the TARP program.

In America ... who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.

He's the President—it's the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it's warranted.

I think it's one thing to be part of a very important group called the Senate of the United States and cast a vote. You're one of 100. I think it says even more to be a governor, where you ultimately have that political responsibility and accountability to succeed.

When I think about what I'm going through, as President, it doesn't compare to what the folks that I'm representing are going through. They're losing jobs. They're trying to figure out how to pay their medical bills. They've seen retirements suddenly dissipate because of what's happening in the stock market. And so as tough as the job might be, and the politics of Washington can sometimes be I'm always reminded of how fortunate I am to be here, and what an extraordinary responsibility I have to try to deliver on some of the promises that I made during the election.

Even if you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’re going to have to mow that side too.

I think it is absolutely reprehensible to believe that any member of this House, Democrat or Republican, would want to do anything that would jeopardize the ability to find out exactly what happened leading up to hurricane Katrina and exactly what happened in the aftermath.

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.