Warren Buffett Quotes

People aren't as impressed by homes anymore after they saw how they collapsed in price with the financial crisis.

House prices just soared beyond - beyond reason in many places and they got financed in silly ways, and people lied about loans, all kinds of accesses entered into it. But that is what - that is the single biggest cause of why we're here.

Housing was ground zero for the Great Recession. Between early 2006 and Obama's inauguration in 2009, average house prices fell by a third across the country. In certain areas, including cities as diverse as Akron, Orlando and Las Vegas, house prices fell by more than half.

Nothing would assure a recession more than a significant drop in housing prices.

New York periodically goes through a real estate crisis. I didn't subscribe to the school that real estate only goes up.

We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices. The bubble burst in housing because people couldn’t pay their mortgages because of $4 a gallon gasoline.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.

I got plenty of guesses wrong on things in the past as well. I don't want to pretend I have some great insight... But when the global financial crisis came along in 2008 it was scary times if you were in the middle of building $5 billion buildings. It wasn't perfect... I think that I am the luckiest person in Australia.

I would say the biggest single cause was we had an incredible residential real estate bubble.

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

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.

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession.

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.

These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.

Our economy isn't going to recover until the housing market finds its footing.

What happened in 2008 stopped people in their tracks. People stopped looking at their homes simply as commodities to exploit and starting thinking about how they might personalise that space and make them less bland and more autobiographical, and that's healthy, I think.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'

The housing market will get worse before it gets better.

In 2008, when the real estate market blew up, it principally hurt older people who saw the value of their houses go down, along with their pension plans.

Until we stem the housing correction, until the biggest part of that is behind us and we have more stability in housing prices, we're going to continue to have turmoil in the financial markets.

Remnants of the foreclosure crisis linger everywhere.

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.

For my own part, I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.

But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.