Although to my knowledge the company has always made good faith efforts to get its accounting right, the SEC has determined that mistakes were made. By my early retirement, I have held myself accountable. |
Based on the presentation that we heard today, there are more issues then the last time we sat down, ... It fails to target tax relief on middle incomes as the president's approach would do. |
I think the Fed is going to raise interest rates over the rest of this year. I think it will go up at least 100 basis points before the year is out. So the Fed funds rate will rise from about 6 percent to at least 7 percent. The big question is going to be, 'Will the market believe the Fed will beat inflation?' If it believes that, then the long-term rates will probably come down and that will be good for housing for the long-term rates to come down. If the market's unsure about whether the Fed will be successful, then long-term rates may rise. |
It creates a contrast between their ideas and ours. We are perfectly happy to be judged by that contrast. |
It will be about 20 percent. Down substantially from the level that the president inherited when he came to office. The government is shrinking, as a percentage of our economy, not growing. |
It will be the second-best year in housing history, and we believe it will be a very strong year for Fannie Mae, |
It's going to be a very targeted tax cut program that I think is going to make a meaningful difference for American families, |
People are buying new homes, existing homes at record levels. And that just shows the underlying strength of the economy and the optimism of families that this is still a good time to buy a home even though interest rates on mortgages have risen substantially, |
The mortgage is the largest obligation that people take on and it's very expensive to get a mortgage and very painful. It's not a fun process. So we've invested quite a bit of money in using the Internet and e-commerce to make it easier. Fannie Mae has become one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world. Last year, we underwrote through automated underwriting and electronically, two and a half million loans, $300 billion of transactions. This year will be over $400 billion. So e-commerce is moving into the mortgage sector and it's going to affect everybody. |
This was an extraordinary year for Fannie Mae in every respect, |
We are in favor of having the most accurate measure of inflation possible, in order to index those various programs, and we are trying to measure what the real cost-of-living changes are, |
We are working on a wide variety of ways to bring to the mortgage finance system cost savings for consumers as well as lenders in the mortgage market, |
We think that it's unwise to put into the constitution a mechanism that enshrines for all time a particular way of measuring the budget. |
We think we can make progress on upper-income premiums. |
When they had difficulties they've had a tendency to lurch to the right and out of the mainstream, and we hope that doesn't happen this time, |