Fannie Mae 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.

As the titanic losses were racking up, Fannie Mae's operators, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, disguised the catastrophe by orchestrating a $5 billion accounting fraud - all the while continuing to pressure banks to make absurd, politically correct loans and denouncing Republicans as enemies of the poor.

My constituents say, 'Congressman, have you balanced the budget?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, we're working on it.' And they are going to say, 'Well, Congressman, did you get rid of Fannie and Freddie?' And I'm going to say, 'Well, we're working on it.'

We have the idea of saying that put limitations on bailouts, so that the bailouts don't occur in the future, so that we don't have to do the - look to see AIG situations or Bear Stearns situations or the Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which is probably going to be more money spent on those two institutions than the Congress spent on the TARP program.

Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would destabilize the greatest economy in the world.

We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about. People matter more than Wall Street.

Between the Community Redevelopment Act, requiring banks to make what I would call very weak loans, and specific quotas that the Congress imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that created the market demand that really led to the subprime phenomenon.

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.

Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company could not, although Fannie Mae explicitly says that its bonds do not carry a federal guarantee.

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

Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time.

If your appraisal comes back too low - you don't have at least 10% equity for a conforming loan or 20% for a jumbo loan - you might not be able to refinance at all, at least with a loan that's packaged and sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means you may have to pay a much higher rate.

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.

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.

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

Fanny Mae was torn between its two duties: to make as much money as they could and to protect the mortgage market.

The bailout of Fannie Mae is completely off the books. It's going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet nobody is placing this in any type of column in accounting for federal debt.

And so Fannie Mae produces very strong results for investors in - when interest rates are high and when interest rates are low, in recession and during booms.

Fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in isolation, without looking at the big picture, would be short-sighted.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from banks and other lenders, providing those financial institutions with capital to make new loans.

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.

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.

I don't think anybody has indicated that I did anything but do my job at Fannie Mae.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, although they're not officially debt of the federal government, they are off-balance-sheet debt.

I think that the responsibility that the Democrats had may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress, or by me when I was President, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.