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Subprime Quotes & Sayings

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Top Subprime Quotes

Subprime Quotes By Richard W. Fisher

In the distance, I see a frightful storm brewing in the form of un-tethered government debt. I choose the words -frightful storm' - deliberately to avoid hyperbole. Unless we take steps to deal with it, the long-term fiscal situation of the federal government will be unimaginably more devastating to our economic prosperity than the subprime debacle and the recent debauching of credit markets that we are working right now so hard to correct. — Richard W. Fisher

Subprime Quotes By Barney Frank

In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view. — Barney Frank

Subprime Quotes By Peter Thiel

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising. — Peter Thiel

Subprime Quotes By Bill Dedman

Groups that work in black neighborhoods around the country have contended that much of subprime lending is 'predatory lending.' — Bill Dedman

Subprime Quotes By Barbara Ehrenreich

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry's purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars' worth of bonds. He'd either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he'd insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn't own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to "insure" it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn't insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market - and this was the second way to think about it. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

From the end of 2005 until the middle of 2007, Wall Street firms created somewhere between $200 and $400 billion in subprime-backed CDOs: No — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Seth Klarman

Financial innovation can be highly dangerous, though almost no one will tell you this. New financial products are typically created for sunny days and are almost never stress-tested for stormy weather. Securitization is an area that almost perfectly fits this description; markets for securitized assets such as subprime mortgages completely collapsed in 2008 and have not fully recovered. Ironically, the government is eager to restore the securitization markets back to their pre-collapse stature. — Seth Klarman

Subprime Quotes By Reclamation Project

Sharecropping is the dirty little secret at the root of America's wealth - along with slavery itself. The immense profits generated by the industrious yet impoverished Black "sharecroppers" and "tenant farmers" financed Europe's and America's Industrial Revolution, including the building of their railroads, factories, mills, and their entire infrastructure. It is truthfully asserted that the major cities of America and the Western world were "built with bricks of cotton." Today the debt traps designed to ensnare the working poor and middle class in a lifelong cycle of debt - the high-cost installment loans that charge usurious interest rates of 100% or more, the "payday" loans that charge 400% interest, the extortionate credit card multi-charges, the subprime mortgages with ballooning interest rates, and the home equity loan swindles - are the bastard children of the sharecropping American South. It — Reclamation Project

Subprime Quotes By Richard Bitner

If you hang around the subprime lending business long enough, you'll meet your share of interesting borrowers: strippers, cons, pimps, thugs and various other upstanding citizens of the community. These were not out typical customers. But if a borrower has credit problems and a checkered past, employment gaps and income from unverifiable sources, he usually ends up talking with a subprime lender. — Richard Bitner

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

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

Subprime Quotes By Niall Ferguson

The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane. — Niall Ferguson

Subprime Quotes By Michael Hureaux-Perez

All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple. — Michael Hureaux-Perez

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Ann Coulter

I think Obama has redefined the Democratic Party. It used to be the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion, and now it's surrender, socialism, and subprime mortgages. — Ann Coulter

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus, — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Gilad Atzmon

It was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.
'Innovation', said Greenspan in April 2005, 'has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants'.
It is almost touching to find out that Greenspan cares so much about immigrants. — Gilad Atzmon

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

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

Subprime Quotes By Terence Corcoran

That eerie hissing you hear may well be the air beginning to seep out of the green energy bubble. The sound is similar to the pfffffft and sshhhhsssssp noises we heard in the early days of the dot-com bubble collapse or the subprime mortgage meltdown. — Terence Corcoran

Subprime Quotes By Peter Wallison

Instead of 6.7 million, the actual number was probably closer to 18 million, and, including Alt-A loans and loans backing PMBS, at least 31 million. Most of the missing subprime loans were on the balance sheets of Fannie and Freddie, which were hiding the numbers of subprime loans they had acquired to meet the affordable-housing goals. — Peter Wallison

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Eddie Huang

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

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

All these subprime companies were calling and hollering at him: You're wrong. Your data's wrong. And he just hollered back at them, 'It's YOUR fucking data! — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Robert Kiyosaki

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. — Robert Kiyosaki

Subprime Quotes By Niall Ferguson

Then resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and sold them on to investors around the world, all eager for a few hundredths of a percentage point more return on their capital. Repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), these subprime securities could be transformed from risky loans to flaky borrowers into triple-A rated investment-grade securities. — Niall Ferguson

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Dave Brat

Fannie and Freddie made two-thirds of all subprime mortgages. That is not a free market institution. That entity, along with the Fed printing too much money back in '03 and '04, caused the housing collapse. So we need to take free markets seriously. That means we have to put an end to all these tax credits and tax deductions and loopholes. — Dave Brat

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor." The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side - the entire financial system, essentially - had gambled with the odds against them. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Eric Maskin

If banks anticipate government will come to the rescue should the credit market go badly awry, they may make loans that would otherwise be imprudent, e.g. subprime loans with little prospect of repayment. — Eric Maskin

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side - the entire financial system, essentially - had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What's strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Trevor Noah

We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off.
If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place. — Trevor Noah

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Back in 1996, 65 percent of subprime loans had been fixed-rate, meaning that typical subprime borrowers might be getting screwed, but at least they knew for sure how much they owed each month until they paid off the loan. By 2005, 75 percent of subprime loans were some form of floating-rate, usually fixed for the first two years. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Wilbur Ross

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

Subprime Quotes By Ben Bernanke

We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system. — Ben Bernanke

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction of others. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Bill Dedman

Subprime lending is growing faster in black areas than in white areas. — Bill Dedman

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

At the top of Charlie Ledley's list of concerns, after Cornwall Capital had laid its bets against subprime loans, was that the powers that be might step in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers. After — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

This wasn't just another company - this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Anonymous

South Africa's subprime crisis OP-ED — Anonymous

Subprime Quotes By Peter Thiel

University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties. — Peter Thiel

Subprime Quotes By Robert Kiyosaki

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. — Robert Kiyosaki

Subprime Quotes By Gary Weiss

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

Subprime Quotes By Thomas Frank

In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now. — Thomas Frank

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the "originate and sell" model. This proved such a hit - Wall Street would buy your loans, even if you would not! - that a new company, called B&C mortgage, was founded to do nothing but originate and sell. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Unpleasant odor wafting from the subprime mortgage industry that Eisman had detected. These companies disclosed their ever-growing earnings, but not much else. One of the many items they failed to disclose was the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Phil Gramm

I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action. — Phil Gramm

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

We fought with those cocksuckers all the way down," says one Deutsche Bank trader. And, all the way down, the debt collectors at Deutsche Bank sensed the bond traders at Morgan Stanley misunderstood their own trade. They weren't lying; they genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Matt Taibbi

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

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Niall Ferguson

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

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

As a rule, any loan that had been turned into an acronym or abbreviation could more clearly be called a "subprime loan," but the bond market didn't want to be clear. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on. A few Wall Street CEOs had been fired for their roles in the subprime mortgage catastrophe, but most remained in their jobs, and they, of all people, became important characters operating behind the closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next. With them were a handful of government officials - the same government officials who should have known a lot more about what Wall Street firms were doing, back when they were doing it. All shared a distinction: They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger's syndrome. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Bethany McLean

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

Subprime Quotes By Al Gore

You need to really scrub your investment portfolios, because I guarantee you, many of you are going to find them chock-full of subprime carbon assets. — Al Gore

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn't ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn't know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Marilynne Robinson

Everywhere the crisis of the private financial system has been transformed into a tale of slovenly and overweening government that perpetuates and is perpetuated by a dependent and demanding population ... For about ten days the crisis was interpreted as a consequence of the ineptitude of the highly paid, and then it transmogrified into a grudge against the populace at large. — Marilynne Robinson

Subprime Quotes By Henry Paulson

I don't see (subprime mortgage market troubles) imposing a serious problem. I think it's going to be largely contained. — Henry Paulson

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

The subprime mortgage machine was up and running again, as if it had never broken down in the first place. If the first act of subprime lending had been freaky, this second act was terrifying. Thirty billion dollars was a big year for subprime lending in the mid-1990s. In 2000 there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, and 55 billion dollars' worth of those loans had been repackaged as mortgage bonds. In 2005 there would be $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Ben Bernanke

I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict. — Ben Bernanke

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Why, for example, wasn't AIG required to reserve capital against them? Why, for that matter, were Moody's and Standard & Poor's willing to bless 80 percent of a pool of dicey mortgage loans with the same triple-A rating they bestowed on the debts of the U.S. Treasury? Why didn't someone, anyone, inside Goldman Sachs stand up and say, "This is obscene. The rating agencies, the ultimate pricers of all these subprime mortgage loans, clearly do not understand the risk, and their idiocy is creating a recipe for catastrophe"? — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Elizabeth Warren

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

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud ... . The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000." Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

Back in July 2003, he'd written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a likely housing crash: "Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles - or major deflations - on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course ... . In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80%. — Michael Lewis

Subprime Quotes By Michael Lewis

By early 2005 all the big Wall Street investment banks were deep into the subprime game. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all had what they termed "shelves" for their subprime wares, with strange names like HEAT and SAIL and GSAMP, that made it a bit more difficult for the general audience to see that these subprime bonds were being underwritten by Wall Street's biggest names. — Michael Lewis