Warren Buffett Quotes

The crash of 2008 was driven in no small part by unfair practices in the mortgage industry which led to many consumers being trapped in loans they didn't understand and couldn't afford.

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.

Too-easy credit and millions of bad loans made during the U.S. housing bubble paved the way for the financial calamity and Great Recession that followed. Today, by contrast, credit is too tight. Mortgage loans are particularly hard to get, creating a problem for the housing market and the broader economy.

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.

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.

Remnants of the foreclosure crisis linger everywhere.

Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.

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

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

The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

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.

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

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

I had begun to worry about the housing market back in 2003, when lenders first resurrected interest-only mortgages, loosening their credit standards to generate a greater volume of loans. Throughout 2004, I had watched as these mortgages were offered to more and more subprime borrowers - those with the weakest credit.

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.

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.

When we went crazy, and we did go crazy on residential real estate, it set things in motion that just - the dominoes started toppling.

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.

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.

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

When I saw houses in Palmdale going for $500K, I knew something was wrong. If you got foreclosed, I don't feel sorry for you!

I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it's exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.

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.