Mark Zandi Quotes

We’re getting job creation in healthcare and educational services. We’ve been getting that all along. It’s demographically driven, it’s funded by the government, and that’s held up.

We need to get rid of the debt ceiling law. It’s anachronistic and it’s a problem.

Too-easy credit and millions of bad loans made during the U.S. housing bubble paved the way for the financial calamity and Great Recession that followed. Today, by contrast, credit is too tight. Mortgage loans are particularly hard to get, creating a problem for the housing market and the broader economy.

They called me the sexiest economist in America, and that was years ago, when I had hair and body mass and my teeth were shiny.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren’t among them.

There is no better way to quickly buoy hard-pressed homeowners than helping them take advantage of the currently record low fixed mortgage rates and significantly reduce their monthly mortgage payments.

There are different flavors of recession. You can get into some pretty dark scenarios pretty quickly.

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.

The principal linkages between Japan and the U.S. global economies are trade, financial markets, and commodity markets.

The Obama administration deserves credit for quickly ending the housing free fall. In particular, Obama empowered the Federal Housing Administration to ensure that households could find mortgages at low interest rates even during the worst phase of the financial panic.

The most important point is, in a time of crisis, there is no way out but for the government to be bold and aggressive.

The key to house prices is the share of foreclosure or short sales in the total housing market. When that share rises, house prices will fall, because distressed properties sell for significantly less – currently around 25 percent below non-distressed houses.

The FHA’s success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation’s mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.

The extension and expansion of the payroll tax holidays for workers would be number one on my list and key to avoiding recession

The discussion in Washington has changed dramatically. I mean, it’s no longer a question of should we address entitlements – it’s no longer a question of do we need to reduce spending in the future.

The clearest way to cut some of this fiscal drag would be to extend the current payroll tax holiday and increase it – as proposed by President Barack Obama. This would cut the fiscal drag by almost half.

The Bush tax cuts should be extended permanently for families with annual incomes of less than $250,000 and should be phased out slowly for those making more than that. Raising taxes on anyone now, when the economic recovery is so fragile, would be a mistake.

The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control.

The average credit score of today’s FHA borrowers is higher than the average American household with a score. As it becomes more costly and difficult to get a FHA loan, loans from private mortgage lenders will become more attractive and their market share will grow.

President Obama’s reelection started the countdown for lawmakers to address the fiscal cliff and the statutory debt limit. Unless the President and House Republicans can agree on changes to current law, the U.S. economy will be in recession by spring.