Housing Finance Quotes

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.

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

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - two bloated and corrupt government-sponsored programs - contributed heavily to the crisis.In order to prevent another crisis, we need to do what we should have done years ago - reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We also need to repeal Dodd-Frank, the Democrats' failed solution. Under Dodd-Frank, 10 banks too big to fail have become five banks too big to fail. Thousands of community banks have gone out of business.

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.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

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.

I personally believe that there's going to be a good case for the government preserving some type of guarantee to make sure that people have the ability to borrow to finance a house even in a very damaging recession. I think there's going to be a good case for that.

We will not support returning Fannie and Freddie to the role they played before conservatorship, where they fought to take market share from private competitors while enjoying the privilege of government support.

Congress created Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970. For many years, these institutions prudently pursued their core mission of enhancing the availability of credit for housing.

Housing has always been a key to Great Resets. During the Great Depression and New Deal, the federal government created a new system of housing finance to usher in the era of suburbanization. We need an even more radical shift in housing today. Housing has consumed too much of our economic resources and distorted the economy. It has trapped people who are underwater on their mortgages or can't sell their homes. And in doing so has left the labor market unable to flexibly adjust to new economic realities.

The way we finance homes in this country is slow, filled with middlemen, who run a nonstandardized evaluation process. This makes financing a home cumbersome and difficult.

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.

We are asking the question: What makes the most sense for public-private partnerships for affordable housing.

No single housing finance institution should be too big to fail.

You can design a mortgage system that is different without a Fannie and Freddie, but there are principles you have to have, to have a good system.

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years.

Preserving the 30-year prepayable fixed-rate mortgage - it's like the bedrock of the housing system - is critical.

The Federal Reserve is not charged with designing or evaluating proposals for housing finance reform. But we are responsible for regulating and supervising banking institutions to ensure their safety and soundness, and more broadly for the stability of the financial system.

A mortgage casts a shadow on the sunniest field.