A Quote by Alex Berenson

Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time. — © Alex Berenson
Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time.
And so Fannie Mae produces very strong results for investors in - when interest rates are high and when interest rates are low, in recession and during booms.
Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company could not, although Fannie Mae explicitly says that its bonds do not carry a federal guarantee.
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.
For people who grew up in the last four decades of the 20th century, it is hard to grasp the concept of negative interest rates. How is it even possible? If interest rates are the price of money, is the marketplace broadcasting that money is on sale? Are we just giving it away?
There have been times when the Federal Reserve has restricted the money supply and raised interest rates to gain an end, which had much better been left to another Government agency or the Congress to attain. The country could have had lower interest rates without sacrificing anything else.
Fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in isolation, without looking at the big picture, would be short-sighted.
The underlying strategy of the Fed is to tell people, "Do you want your money to lose value in the bank, or do you want to put it in the stock market?" They're trying to push money into the stock market, into hedge funds, to temporarily bid up prices. Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it's a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.
The real challenge was to model all the interest rates simultaneously, so you could value something that depended not only on the three-month interest rate, but on other interest rates as well.
The single biggest issue that I'm very sensitive to is inflation. I'm very concerned that this extended period where the interest rates were quite low and stimulated a lot of activity could breed inflation and create a problem for us.
If you put Canada into $1.5 trillion in debt and interest rates go up just 200 basis points, you cannot provide the services to 36 million people that were guaranteed to them in the social contract they have with Canada. That's a very, very scary prospect. You can't burden this economy with that much debt. The risk you take on is insurmountable. You have to assume for the next 50 years that rates don't go up? That's insane. That's irresponsible. That's stupid.
If my company spends money, it should be disclosed to the shareholders and how it was spent. With my personal money, I can do anything I want. But company money should be disclosed.
The FOMC has considerable control over short-term interest rates. We have much less influence over long-term rates, which are set in the marketplace.
When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget the children's birthdays, there's a good chance you've become too wrapped up in your work.
I want you to say to me right from the start, "We are here to serve customers. We're not here for me to make a lot of money. We're not here to bet on interest rates or credit spreads. We are here to serve our customers really well over a long period of time, and that's how you build a successful business." And so I want to see that, too, you know?
There are times when a market such as housing, transportation or the stock or mortgage market keep rising and people with capital want to join in this growth. Soon the markets become overheated, partly because of the abundance of investment money and speculation. This is when the government should raise interest rates and increase the cost of borrowed money. Governments are shy about doing this because it could cause the very recession. Yet this is the best time to do this so that the inevitable recession never reaches the magnitude of the recent Great Recession.
Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called 'FM Policy Focus.' What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would destabilize the greatest economy in the world.
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