Mortgage-backed Securities Quotes

We need to hold Wall Street accountable for issuing the kinds of deceptive loans that nearly brought our economy to its knees in 2008.

The only surprise about the economic crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many.

The people who did the collateralized mortgage obligations, sold them to pension funds, then sold them short, then bought credit default swap insurance on them, are just amazing. They are a law unto themselves.

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 subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs - derivatives - exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institutions throughout the world.

The reality is that what we did in 2010 with the Dodd-Frank wasn't enough.

What caused the economic collapse 2008? It was the subprime mortgage crisis.

In June 2005, mortgage rates were at 40-year lows, and risk premiums on mortgage securities were at all-time lows. Once the banks migrated to the subprime area, there was little else that could be done to send housing prices higher.

If some institution wants to sell you a billion dollars worth of mortgages, they might have to sell 100 million in the market, and then you'll buy the other 900 million on the same terms. Now, the very fact that this has been authorized or will be authorized, I hope, will firm up the market to some degree. And that's fine. But you don't want to have artificial prices being paid.

Investigating some of the largest subprime lenders - Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Ameriquest, Household Finance - I've seen how their terrible, toxic loans were closed by any means necessary and eventually packaged, sold as securities, and bet upon until they exploded and decimated our economy.

The overwhelming majority of new mortgages are issued with government backing in a highly concentrated securitization market. That leaves us with both potential taxpayer liability and systemic risk.

The major driver of economics is the equilibrium approach, which has taken various forms over the years. General equilibrium is the statement that all the different parts of the economy influence each other, even if it's remote, like mortgage-backed securities and their demands on automobiles.

Much of the blame for the Great Recession lies with abuses in the housing market - namely the creation of risky and unsustainable home loans that were packaged and sold as quality investments around the globe.

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.

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.

Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors.

Like many other banks and finance companies, Green Tree used a process called securitization to resell its home loans to outside investors. Green Tree grouped thousands of these small loans into a pool worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

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.

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

American business would be run better today if there was more alignment between CEOs' interest and the company. For example, would the financial crisis of 2008 have occurred if the CEO of Lehman and Morgan Stanley and Goldman and Citibank had to take a very small percentage of every mortgage-backed security... or every loan they made?

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.

Legislative reforms in the 1990s and the public/private structure led managements to expand the GSEs' balance sheets to enormous size, underpinned by wafer-thin slivers of capital, driving high shareholder returns and very high compensation for management.

In our equities business, 49 of the 50 most important Lehman clients are back doing business with us. The flows are 75 to 80 per cent of what they were prior to the bankruptcy. The issues which damaged Lehman were around commercial mortgages and illiquid private equity assets.

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.

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