J. C. Watts Quotes

We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Frank Raines.

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

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

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.

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

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

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.

The too-big-to-fail reform project is massive in scope. In my view, it holds real promise. But the project will take years to complete. Success is not assured.

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.

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.

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 Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

The Dodd Bill does very little to reduce financial risks. What it will do is make Wall Street even more the servant of bureaucrats in Washington and the political party in power. That is not in the best interests of the American people.

If a bank's too big so that it can't fail without hurting our economy, well then, it's too big.

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.

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

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.

Although not well known outside Wall Street, Freddie Mac and its corporate cousin, Fannie Mae, are two of the world's largest financial institutions and play a crucial role in the housing market.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.

You can look at what I did in the Senate. I did introduce legislation to rein in compensation. I looked at ways that the shareholders would have more control over what was going on in that arena. And specifically said to Wall Street, that what they were doing in the mortgage market was bringing our country down.

Too big to fail is too big.

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.

Where human lives are concerned, time is always short, yet the world has witnessed the vast resources that governments can draw upon to rescue financial institutions deemed 'too big to fail.'

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