Housing Market Collapse Quotes

At the center of every recession is a serious imbalance in the economy and mirrored in the financial system. Think subprime mortgage and the Great Recession, or the technology bubble and the early 2000s recession. There are no such imbalances today.

The Nasdaq bubble and crash were followed by the real estate bubble then subprime crash, which led to the unprecedented printing of trillions of dollars in an attempt to prevent a global depression.

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.

I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.

The bottom line for housing is that the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse—one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy—while not fully allayed have diminished. Moreover, while the future for housing activity remains uncertain, I think there is a reasonable chance that housing is in the process of stabilizing, which would mean that it would put a considerably smaller drag on the economy going forward.

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.

We've been in a recession, by any common sense definition, because if you look at the American public, they've got 20 billion - 20 trillion, I should say, worth of residential homes.

I think people need to remember what the situation was when President [Barack] Obama came into office.

Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.

No one pushed harder than Congressman Barney Frank to force banks and other financial institutions to reduce their mortgage lending standards, in order to meet government-set goals for more home ownership. Those lower mortgage lending standards are at the heart of the increased riskiness of the mortgage market and of the collapse of Wall Street securities based on those risky mortgages.

I have met so many people who had their life savings wiped out, who lost their homes, who are barely back with their heads above water.This was a disaster for our country, and we can never let that happen again.

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.

I am worried that the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression.

Nine million people - nine million people lost their jobs [in 2008]. Five million people lost their homes. And $13 trillion in family wealth was wiped out.Now, we have come back from that abyss. And it has not been easy.

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.

In fact, Donald [Trump] was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis.

I don't see (subprime mortgage market troubles) imposing a serious problem. I think it's going to be largely contained.

I bought a house right before the housing crisis happened. So I paid too much and then I was stuck with it for a long time. So that was sad for me. I was like, "I'd better make a movie about this to get it out of my system."