Quotes & Sayings About Mortgages

And you'd see that 2/28 interest only ARM mortgages were only 5.85% of the pool in early 2004, but by late 2004 they were 17.48% of the pool, and by late summer 2005 25.34% of the pool. Yet average FICO [consumer credit] scores for the pool, percent of no-doc ["Liar"] loan to value measures and other indicators were pretty static ... . The point is that these measures could stay roughly static, but the overall pool of mortgages being issued, packaged and sold off was worsening in quality, because for the same average FICO scores or the same average loan to value, you were getting a higher percentage of interest only mortgages. — Michael Lewis

To the extent that people overpay as a result of the Libor manipulation, they should be able to get their money back. Individuals who have mortgages, pension funds who had pensioner investments - whoever was ripped off is entitled to get their money back. — Peter Welch

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike. — George Soros

The Obama administration deserves credit for quickly ending the housing free fall. In particular, Obama empowered the Federal Housing Administration to ensure that households could find mortgages at low interest rates even during the worst phase of the financial panic. — Mark Zandi

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

Didn't he have to admit, begrudgingly, that in some extra-perverse corner of his brain the idea of having to be out of town before sundown appealed to him? New Orleans had been the only constant thing in his life. But didn't he yet an itchy foot sometimes, didn't he sometimes think about just throwing all his stuff in his car and going?
Of course he did. Everybody did, even normal people, the ones with triple mortgages and orthodontists' bills and responsibilities to everything except what they really wanted. — Poppy Z. Brite

What I want people to know is I went to Wall Street before the crash. I was the one saying you're going to wreck the economy because of these shenanigans with mortgages. I called to end the carried interest loophole that hedge fund managers enjoy. I proposed changes in CEO compensation. — Hillary Clinton

For too long, tricks and traps in mortgages, credit cards, and other financial transactions have stripped wealth from working families. — Jeff Merkley

Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as "tragic," in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives. — Robert Galbraith

Everything that I've gone through since the end of 2010, from me finding out about my financial adviser stealing, mismanaging my money - that affected everything, from child support, mortgages, to me having to sell my properties, me being in and out of court trying to modify my child support. It's a lot to deal with at one time. — Terrell Owens

The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it; it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy. — Peter Kropotkin

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

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. — Thomas Sowell

We must fundamentally restructure our student loan program. It makes no sense that students and their parents are forced to pay interest rates for higher education loans that are much higher than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages. — Bernie Sanders

The "consumer loan" piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default. — Michael Lewis

And I think we need a combination of a freeze, potentially, and also we need to sit down with the - with the banking industry and talk to them about ways in which we can help them be able to work those mortgages out, because it's absolutely imperative that we keep people in their homes. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

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

when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it. They didn't feel like the world owed them a living. They were more loyal. — Michael Lewis

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

The people that make this country work, the people who pay on their mortgages, the people getting up and going to work, striving in this recession to not participate in it, they're not the enemy. They're the people that hire you. They're the people that are going to give you a job. — Rush Limbaugh

The aim of promoting low down payments is to push prices back up so that fewer houses are going to be in negative equity and fewer people are going to walk away from the mortgages. That will save the from taking a loss on their junk mortgage loans. — Michael Hudson

Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its sesonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time ...
— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher. If the playing field is leveled and the broken market fixed, a lot more money will stay in the pockets of millions of hard-working families. That's real stimulus - money to families, without increasing our national debt. — Elizabeth Warren

why the rating agencies weren't more critical of bonds underpinned by floating-rate subprime mortgages. Subprime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default. Few, if any, should be running the risk of their interest payment spiking up. As most of these loans were structured, however, the homeowner would pay a fixed teaser rate of, say, 8 percent for the first two years, and then, at the start of the third year, the interest rate would skyrocket to, say, 12 percent, and thereafter it would float at permanently high levels. — Michael Lewis

Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and
mortgages became derivative investments. — Douglas Rushkoff

And people who have kids, people with husbands and jobs and mortgages, don't much want to hear about other people's paintings. — Michele Young-Stone

Well, you know, we've got a lot of stimulus in the economy already from the tax cut, from the lowered interest rates, and also from the refinancing of mortgages. — Franklin Raines

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil. — Jeff Bezos

Bankers make money, too, but I'm not running up into Chase and throwing milk shakes at the homie selling subprime mortgages. — Eddie Huang

I'm asking Congress to pass my Zero Down Payment Initiative. We should remove the 3 percent down payment rule for first time home buyers with FHA-insured mortgages. — George W. Bush

The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipalities of Rana, Hemnes, Hattjelldal and Narvik invested some $120 million of their taxpayers' money in CDOs secured on American subprime mortgages. — Niall Ferguson

A concrete embodiment of the jubilee commandment was evidenced in a rural church in Iowa during the "farm crisis." The banker in the town held mortgages on many farms. The banker and the farmers belonged to the same church. The banker could have foreclosed. He did not because, he said, "These are my neighbors and I want to live here a long time." He extended the loans and did not collect the interest that was rightly his. The pastor concluded, "He was practicing the law of the Jubilee year, and he did not even know it." The pastor might also have noted that the reason the banker could take such action is that his bank was a rare exception. It was locally and independently owned, not controlled by a larger Chicago banking system. — Walter Brueggemann

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them. — Matt Taibbi

The financial collapse of 2008 got its start with predatory mortgages, that weren't sold by community banks and credit unions, they were sold by fly by night mortgage brokers who had almost zero federal oversight and then the big banks looked over, saw the profit potential and they wanted it bad. So they jumped in and sold millions of these terrible mortgages while the bank regulators just looked the other way. — Elizabeth Warren

Money is finite. There is not an infinite supply. That's something a lot of people have trouble remembering these days. In a time when crazy mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards make you believe anyone can purchase anything at any time with no consequences, it's easy to forget that money has limits. — Dave Ramsey

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped "in a futile attempt to attract white residents," as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood's future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. — Isabel Wilkerson

How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. — Yuval Noah Harari

One more time? We've done this. We've done this at least four times where there's a new government program to help homeowners who have trouble with their mortgages. None of these programs have worked. I don't know why anyone would think that this next idea is going to work. All it does is delay the clearing of the market. As soon as the market clears and we understand where the prices really are - [that] will be the most important thing we can do in order to improve home values around the country. — John Boehner

These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent, were directed at new single-family suburban construction.c Intentionally or not, the FHA and VA programs discouraged the renovation of existing housing stock, while turning their back on the construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types. Simultaneously, a 41,000-mile interstate highway program, coupled with federal and local subsidies for road improvement and the neglect of mass transit, helped make automotive commuting affordable and convenient for the average citizen. — Andres Duany

These senior claims were supposed to be very low-risk; after all, how likely was it that a large number of people would default on their mortgages at the same time? The answer, of course, is that it was quite likely in an environment where homes were worth 30, 40, 50 percent less than the borrowers originally paid for them. So a lot of supposedly safe assets, assets that had been rated AAA by Standard & Poor's or Moody's, ended up becoming "toxic waste", worth only a fraction of their face value. — Paul Krugman

In all three cases, the person makes a higher income than does Mrs. Rule. Yet none is a millionaire. In fact, Mr. Petersen, the marketing manager, has zero invested in stocks. He never invests any of his income. But he lives in a $400,000 home that is surrounded by others in the high-tech field who have big hats and bigger mortgages, but no cattle. Too many high-income/low-net worth types live from paycheck to paycheck, fearing a sudden downturn in our economy. OUR — Thomas J. Stanley

Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit. — Douglas Rushkoff

We cry for mercy to the next amusement, The next amusement mortgages our fields — Edward Young

When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter! — Sinclair Lewis

We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China ... and it becomes this shell game. — Michael Moore

What this means is that the entire business model for something like Chase's credit card business is not much more than a gigantic welfare fraud scheme. These companies borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Fed at rock-bottom rates, then turn around and lend it out to the world at 5, 10, 15, 20 percent, as credit cards and mortgages, boat loans and aircraft loans, and so on. If you pay it back, great, it's a 500 percent or 1,000 percent or 4,000 percent profit for the bank. If you don't pay it back, the company can put your name in the hopper to be sued. A $5,000 debt on a credit card for the now-defunct Circuit City, which was actually a Chase card, became a $13,000 or $14,000 debt by the time the bank finished applying fees and penalties. Just like a welfare application, you have to read the fine print. "They make more on lawsuits than they make on credit interest," says Linda. — Matt Taibbi

People who can't afford their mortgages and have to renegotiate with the bank or something gets repossessed after you worked your whole life. You follow the rules and you do the right thing and you still get screwed. That's what I think a lot of Americans are. — Seth Gordon

Evidently there is no need for delay, no need for further study, if the government takes a loss and Wall Street makes a profit, but it is absolutely necessary to delay if homeowners might have a chance to cut their mortgages and stay in their homes. This is wrong, and it is time to fight back! — Elizabeth Warren

An example of good debt is the debt on the apartment houses I own. That debt is good only as long as there are tenants to pay my mortgages. If tenants stop paying their rent, my good debt turns into bad debt. — Robert Kiyosaki

No man deserves a woman like that. He mortgages his very soul to win her and spends his life paying off the debt. — Tessa Dare

What does a person need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by. — Sterling Hayden

The traditional fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, which were once a majority of all mortgages, were no longer a majority during the housing boom, as ARMs and other "creative" ways of financing the purchase of a home grew rapidly to cope with soaring housing prices. Such innovative mortgages quickly went from being rare to becoming common, especially in places with very high housing costs. — Thomas Sowell

In some ways I think it [the strike] was important. I'm not sure that "worth it" is the right term, but it was important. A lot of people lost a lot of things - I was greatly concerned for our crews. Those are the people who really sort of paid. A lot of us in quiet ways did everything that we could to help people pay mortgages. — Edward Allen Bernero

Professional writers don't have muses; they have mortgages. — Larry Kahaner

The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators. — John Lanchester

I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. — John D. MacDonald

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other. — David Almond

Nationally, the share of mortgages that are underwater fell by about one-half between 2011 and 2014. — Janet Yellen

We "activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies," Sapolsky writes, "but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions. — Paul Tough

If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families. — Elizabeth Warren

When you're in your 20s, you're a little more carefree; you're single. You have a very different way of looking at the world and experiencing the world. But later in your 30s, when you have children, a career, career obstacles, mortgages, car payments and relationships, you have to negotiate; that's a very different life. — Melissa De Sousa

I think the millions of people who had been able to renegotiate their mortgages so they are paying lower interest rates are better off. — David Axelrod

I have to be invested spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically to do theater. I can't do it to make a living. I have four kids, a couple of grandkids, and two mortgages. — Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Indeed, the FHA was born out of the Great Depression, which was also caused in significant part by a foreclosure crisis. Mortgages in the early 1930s were mostly three- to five-year 'bullet' loans, which did not amortize and were due in full at maturity. — Mark Zandi

The idea was to reinvent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds - in short, to convert mortgages into bonds. — Niall Ferguson

Homeowners who refinanced their mortgages took out cash and reduced their monthly payments at the same time. Much of the cash obtained by refinancing was spent on consumer durables, home improvements and the like. — Martin Feldstein

When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it. — Howard Warren Buffett

The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults. — Richard Thaler

Gold has intrinsic value. The problem with the dollar is it has no intrinsic value. And if the Federal Reserve is going to spend trillions of them to buy up all these bad mortgages and all other kinds of bad debt, the dollar is going to lose all of its value. Gold will store its value, and you'll always be able to buy more food with your gold. — Peter Schiff

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. — Rick Santorum

U.N. officials said today they desperately need $7 billion to help people cope with disasters, but they're having a hard time getting people to send rescue money. Here's what the UN should do: Invest in bad mortgages, run a bank into the ground, give yourself a bonus, get some spa treatments and, in no time, the government will send you $750 billion. — Jay Leno

You have the mainstream bourgeois life of the U.S., Europe, the "developed" world - the life of technology, education, mortgages, careers, a certain level of physical comfort - while on the other hand, several billion people on the planet exist on less than a dollar a day. That's a huge and terrible reality to get your head around. — Ben Fountain

Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. — Donna Tartt

The good people of Dakota offered to give Calvin Coolidge a farm if he would live on it. I wouldn't advise you to give those people too much credit for generosity. There is not a farmer in any State in the West that wouldn't be glad to give him a farm if he will paint it, fix up the fences and keep up the series of mortgages that are on it. And if you think Coolidge ain't smart, you just watch him not take it. — Will Rogers

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression. — Jay Griffiths

I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans. — Barack Obama

I think what we need is better understanding of how to do risk analysis of a CDO, but that they still can perform a very valuable function because they can aggregate these risks and pass them around so that mortgages or other kinds of loans can be packaged and sold to investors all over the world, who in most times, would justify a small amount of each one. — Robert F. Engle

Italy's youngsters complain, apparently, about having to live at home until they are 72 but that's because they spend all their money on suits and coffee and Alfa Romeos rather than mortgages. — Jeremy Clarkson

Imagine if the pension funds and endowments that own much of the equity in our financial services companies demanded that those companies revisit the way mortgages were marketed to those without adequate skills to understand the products they were being sold. Management would have to change the way things were done. — Eliot Spitzer

One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost. — David Sedaris

When people have problems with their mortgages and jobs many feel they're a failure, they didn't work hard enough or speak well enough: It's their fault things are going so bad. When they see their bodies right there [at occupations], we have something profoundly in common. — Haskell Wexler

And if you like 14.4 percent unemployment, if you like the fact that 70 percent of home mortgages in Nevada are underwater, then stay the course. Vote for Harry Reid. — John Cornyn

but racism is about the power of a group and in America it's white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don't get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don't get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don't give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don't stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don't choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don't tell white kids that they're not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don't try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don't say they can't use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered "aspirational" by the "mainstream." So — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

And what people want to own, of course, is real estate. So a dental hygienist with bad credit making forty thousand dollars a year felt that she deserved to park her ass in a million-dollar home. With a little creative financing, and as long as housing prices continued to rise, she believed that she could afford a million-dollar home. And as long as the dental hygienist continued to pay interest on the mortgage for the million-dollar home, as long as housing prices continued to rise, as long as more loan officers approved more loans for more dental hygienists with bad credit who could continue to pay the interest on their overblown mortgages, housing prices would indeed stay stratospheric, and banks could print money based on that certainty. And, like your nursery rhyme, that was the house that Jack built." Kalchefsky — Jade Chang

Some think that it is cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10 percent of our people. It isn't. It's just the opposite. What I think is brutal and "false kindness" is keeping people around who aren't going to grow and prosper. There's no cruelty like waiting and telling people late into their careers that they don't belong - just when the options are limited and they're putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages. — Jack Welch

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. — Bob Diamond

Many banks do not advertise they are portfolio lenders and many people working at the bank may not even know what a portfolio lender is. If you are calling up a bank and they say they aren't a portfolio lender, don't give up! Ask to talk to a loan officer and ask specific questions about what type of investor programs they offer. Here are some good questions to ask; Do you loan to investors who already have four mortgages? Do you sell your loans or keep them in-house? Do you allow investors with four or more mortgages to do cash out refinance? What terms and loan programs do you offer investors? ARM, 15, 30 year fixed, balloon? What interest rates are you charging and what are the initial costs for your loans? What — Mark Ferguson

No other facet of American business is more corrupt, more intoxicated with illegality, more weakly regulated, and has a greater impact on poor and working people than debt collectors; not credit card companies or subprime mortgages, not even payday lenders. — Gary Weiss

Ladies and babies, and mortgages, for that matter, can all wait. Acting has done a strange thing to me, though. I often sit there, thinking, 'I love this, but I wouldn't put my daughter on the stage.' — Eddie Redmayne

How well do you know the people who raised you? Look around your dining room table. Look around at your loved ones, especially the elders. The grandparents and the aunts and uncles who used to give you shiny new quarters and unvarnished advice. How much do you really know about their lives. Perhaps you've heard that they served in a war, or lived for a time in a log cabin, or arrived in this country speaking little or no English. Maybe they survived the Holocaust or the Dust Bowl. How were they shaped by the Depression or the Cold War, or the stutter-step march towards integration in their own community? What were they like before they married or took on mortgages and assumed all the worries that attend the feeding, clothing, and education of their children? If you don't already know the answers, the people who raised you will most likely remain a mystery, unless you take the bold step and say: Tell me more about yourself. — Michele Norris

As the United States has become an older nation, reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier. — Charles Duhigg

It matters whether the government blows tens of billions of dollars on tax loopholes for billionaires or whether that same money is used to lower costs for students who have to borrow money to go to college. It matters whether Wall Street can pocket billions of dollars by cheating people on mortgages and tricking them on credit cards or if there's a cop on the beat to keep them honest. It matters whether the minimum wage is set so low that a full-time worker still lives in poverty or if minimum wage also means a livable wage. When — Elizabeth Warren

People hear from Donald Trump that he's such an extraordinary success. They didn't know about Trump airlines and Trump mortgages and Trump vitamin network and Trump steaks and Trump Taj Mahal. They didn't realize a lot of small people have been crushed by Donald Trump's rise to become a very wealthy man, successful financially, but this is a guy who has not been a uniform success. — Mitt Romney

The president says, 'There is lots of people worse off than the Farmers.' I don't know who it could be unless it is the fellow who holds the Mortgages on the Farms. — Will Rogers

The best way to look at any business is from the standpoint of the clients. So there are these certain basic things that aren't going to change. Companies are going to have needs for equity, debt, advice, FX, and derivatives. Individuals are going to have needs for auto loans, mortgages, something that looks like a deposit account, and the ability to send money to people. Those things aren't going to change. — Jamie Dimon

Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free. — Cookie Mueller

Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor.46 If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller returns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair. — Matthew Desmond

Make the financial industry pay for its mistakes. That's the idea behind the best of the Obama administration's reform proposals: If banks issue securities backed by mortgages, say, then require them to hold some of that paper so that they will bear some of the losses. — David Ignatius