Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to return the same compliments to the Senator from Tennessee. He brought a greater breadth of background in housing finance and the public finance sector than I did. But together, working with our other colleagues, I think we have all built a series of critical points. Again, echoing what the Senator from Tennessee said, there are always ways to improve on legislation, but the first and foremost point was that we need to make sure there is taxpayer protection. We need to make sure the taxpayers are fully repaid that $188 billion. We need to make sure as well--and we spend a great deal of time working with industry and others--that there continues to be broad access to market credit. I think one of the challenges we both felt with Fannie and Freddie was there was not only a combination of a private sector gain, public sector loss with this kind of hybrid model, but layered on top of that was a social purpose. I, for one, believe very strongly that we have to make sure there is affordable housing, that there is good access to market credit. But when you layer that on a quasi-private entity, as we did for years with Fannie and Freddie, you end up where you are not sure whether those entities are performing that necessary securitization and financing purpose to maintain the overall housing financing sector or whether they are allowing certain loans that maybe shouldn't have gone into this process because of the social purpose.…”