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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from banks and other lenders, providing those financial institutions with capital to make new loans.

In September 2008, the two largest housing mortgage companies called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were government-sponsored enterprises, which hold hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages, because of the losses they took on the mortgages, they essentially became insolvent, and the government had to take them over.

I think we're not going to preserve Fannie and Freddie in anything like their current form. We're going to have to bring fundamental change to that market.

Fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in isolation, without looking at the big picture, would be short-sighted.

I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.

Even the once simple home mortgage now has so many flavors and styles and variations that it is difficult for people to make a decision.

We gotta get Fannie and Freddie out of government ownership. It makes no sense that these are owned by the government and have been controlled by the government for as long as they have.

Fannie and Freddie made two-thirds of all subprime mortgages. That is not a free market institution. That entity, along with the Fed printing too much money back in '03 and '04, caused the housing collapse. So we need to take free markets seriously. That means we have to put an end to all these tax credits and tax deductions and loopholes.

Opt for a fixed-rate rather than an adjustable-rate mortgage.

You shouldn't be trying to create a system where no bank fails, but you should be creating one that catches a bank and allows it to fail without impacting the financial markets.