Ed Royce Quotes

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

Much of the blame for the Great Recession lies with abuses in the housing market - namely the creation of risky and unsustainable home loans that were packaged and sold as quality investments around the globe.

Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.

The crash of 2008 was driven in no small part by unfair practices in the mortgage industry which led to many consumers being trapped in loans they didn't understand and couldn't afford.

Home ownership was the fig leaf for the rise in subprime lending. But that was really about cash-out refinancings, not buying homes.

Millions of Americans were duped by the federal government and the Federal Reserve into buying homes they could not afford and failed to count the cost. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, they could not keep up the monthly mortgage payments and defaulted.

Investigating some of the largest subprime lenders - Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Ameriquest, Household Finance - I've seen how their terrible, toxic loans were closed by any means necessary and eventually packaged, sold as securities, and bet upon until they exploded and decimated our economy.

Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.

The billionaire founder of investment firm Elliott Management was one of several investors who warned financial ministers in 2007 that a crack in the housing market could cause huge problems for the banking industry.

Created by Congress as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, the CFPB was a direct response to the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession that began with the subprime mortgage debacle and the unraveling of Lehman Brothers investment bank.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.

What caused the economic collapse 2008? It was the subprime mortgage crisis.

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.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren't among them.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs - derivatives - exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institutions throughout the world.

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame.

If there had been a Financial Product Safety Commission in place 10 years ago, the current financial crisis would have been averted.

We need to hold Wall Street accountable for issuing the kinds of deceptive loans that nearly brought our economy to its knees in 2008.

Securitization was one of the most brilliant financial innovations of the 20th century. It freed up a lot of capital. If it had been done responsibly, it would have been a wondrous thing because nothing is more stable, there’s nothing safer, than the American mortgage market.... It worked for years. But then people realized they could scam it.

Giving away food only encourages the poor not to starve. Increase productivity, not employment. Insure profits before we insure people Don’t be haters! We’re job creators. Bailout banks, not these losers (people evicted by banks foreclosing on their mortgages).

You had the Crash [Meltdown] of 2008, where the financial system actually collapsed and had to be put on life support, which consisted of substituting sovereign credit for the financial credit that was no longer credible.

The financial crisis involved significant failures in the functioning, regulation, and supervision of OTC derivatives markets.