Fannie Mae Quotes & Sayings

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. — Franklin Raines

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. — Alex Berenson

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Walter E. Williams

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. — Charles Duhigg

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. — Jean Chatzky

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. — Alex Berenson

We faced a crisis caused by the Federal Reserve, the corporate tax system, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act. But the response of many people in Washington was to blame it on capitalism. — David Boaz

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

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer. — Charles Duhigg

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. — J. C. Watts

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. — Ben Bernanke

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

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. — Mark Zandi

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. — William J. Clinton

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. — Ann Coulter

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. — Leonard Lance

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. — Wilbur Ross

For years, critics of Fannie Mae have warned that it does not give them enough information to judge its risks. — Alex Berenson

Joseph Stiglitz, with two colleagues, the Orszag brothers (Peter and Jonathan), looked at the very same Fannie Mae. They assessed, in a report, that "on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero."* Supposedly, they ran simulations - but didn't see the obvious. They also said that the probability of a default was found to be "so small that it is difficult to detect." It is statements like these and, to me, only statements like these (intellectual hubris and the illusion of understanding of rare events) that caused the buildup of these exposures to rare events in the economy. This is the Black Swan problem that I was fighting. This is Fukushima. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Charles Duhigg

For that purpose, partly as the result of Ranieri's persistent lobbying, two new facilities had sprung up in the federal government alongside Ginnie Mae. They guaranteed the mortgages that did not qualify for the Ginnie Mae stamp. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (called Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (called Fannie Mae) between them, by giving their guarantees, were able to transform most home mortgages into government-backed bonds. — Michael Lewis

Mortgage securities. Pooled together from thousands of mortgages around the United States, these bonds are issued by agencies like the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") or the Government National Mortgage Association ("Ginnie Mae"). However, they are not backed by the U.S. Treasury, so they sell at higher yields to reflect their greater risk. Mortgage bonds generally underperform when interest rates fall and bomb when rates rise. (Over the long run, those swings tend to even out and the higher average yields pay off.) Good mortgage-bond funds are available from Vanguard, Fidelity, and Pimco. But if a broker ever tries to sell you an individual mortgage bond or "CMO," tell him you are late for an appointment with your proctologist. — Benjamin Graham

The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all. The pool of loans underlying the mortgage bond conformed to the standards, in their size and the credit quality of the borrowers, set by one of several government agencies: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae. The loans carried, in effect, government guarantees; if the homeowners defaulted, the government paid off their debts. — Michael Lewis

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

When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget the children's birthdays, there's a good chance you've become too wrapped up in your work. — Peter Lynch

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

These two entities - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - are not facing any kind of financial crisis, — Barney Frank

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

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. — Carly Fiorina

RE: GSEs like Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae: "creditors will continue to underprice the risk-taking of these financial institutions, overfund them, and fail to provide effective market discipline Facing prices that are too low, systemically important firms will take on too much risk." — Gary H. Stern

When the mortgage giant Fannie Mae recruited Daniel H. Mudd, he told a friend he wanted to work for an altruistic business. Already a decorated marine and a successful executive, he wanted to be a role model to his four children - just as his father, the television journalist Roger Mudd, had been to him. — Charles Duhigg

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. — Newt Gingrich

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. — Alex Berenson

Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt. Still, the love remained. Why? — Frank Herbert