Maxine Waters Quotes

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.

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.

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.

One third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Wall Street buyers of repackaged loans didn't mind buying risky paper because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout from the taxpayers. Today's housing mess can be laid directly at the feet of Congress and the White House.

These two entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.

In September 2008, the two largest housing mortgage companies called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were government-sponsored enterprises, which hold hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages, because of the losses they took on the mortgages, they essentially became insolvent, and the government had to take them over.

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis.

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.

If Freddie Mac is unable to raise capital, it could spark a political and financial crisis.

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.

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

Fannie Mae may have conformed to the rules but the rules didn’t conform to reality. A major bank or financial institution could meet every single regulatory requirement yet still be at the risk of collapse.

The people who generated great personal wealth in the process of creating this mess [the Great Recession]—bankers and financiers who invented products like mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps—are now actively eschewing any responsibility for that problem by blaming the state for their mistakes.

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.

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.

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.

The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control.

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.

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.

The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.

I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.

Governments need to be authorized to provide 'open bank assistance.' The convolutions of Dodd-Frank aimed at 'avoiding' this tactic are ludicrous and will prove to be extremely costly to the system.