Quotes About Mortgages

Those mortgages had been bundled and sliced and diced into complex instruments and distributed around the world. No one really knew where the losses would surface.

delinquencies and defaults increased to levels not seen since the Depression,

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.

Because reverse mortgages do not require borrowers to make immediate repayments, the interest charges are added to the debt every day, and the total amount owed grows over time.

And let's be honest about it. Hybrid ARMs were never made based on the assumption that the borrowers would be able to make the payment once the loan reset. They were designed as two or three year "bullets" ... with the assumption that home appreciation would allow the borrower to refinance at, or before, reset. Given current conditions in the housing market, this business model is no longer viable, which should come as no shock to anyone.

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.

they'd shared an exuberance that eventually suffocated under tenure applications and mortgages. This was not a new story. Maybe Iano still had access to that kind of joy, but she'd surrendered it as her half of the marital bargain.

There was a time when people thought that if you piled a bunch of mortgages together, the top of the pile was AAA. There are a lot of things that become consensus.

savings and time deposits, savings-and-loan-association accounts, life insurance, annuities, and real-estate mortgages or equity ownership.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do we need long-term fixed-rate mortgages in a world where the work force of the future is going to change jobs and move every three to five years?

The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

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.

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

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.

For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages.

Your condo loan might be packaged with 999 other mortgages and sold off to an investor who wanted to receive the steady stream of income as those mortgages were (hopefully) paid off.

You can get in and out of credit cards in a hurry. Not so easy to get in and out of mortgages.

I pay my credit cards in full every month - as well as all my bills and mortgages.

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.

the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), which was to cater to poor borrowers like military veterans, and a rechartered Fannie Mae, now a privately owned government sponsored enterprise (GSE), which was permitted to buy conventional as well as government-guaranteed mortgages.