Subprime Quotes

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

Henry Paulson

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Eddie Huang

#6. 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

#7. Groups that work in black neighborhoods around the country have contended that much of subprime lending is 'predatory lending.'

Bill Dedman

#8. 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

#9. Subprime lending is growing faster in black areas than in white areas.

Bill Dedman

#10. Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,

Michael Lewis

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.

Niall Ferguson

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.

Ben Bernanke

#28. South Africa's subprime crisis OP-ED

Anonymous

#29. 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

#30. I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action.

Phil Gramm

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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