Replies to post #129594 on Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)

[malebaboon]

Yes that's the Buffett interview and here's the transcript:

sense for these institutions to be this big? well, if you look at canada, look at france, germany, the big banks are a much bigger percentage of the gdp than they are here. so it -- it's true that wells and wachovia got put together, wamu and jpmorgan. but the concentration -- i do not think -- i don't think it's inappropriate at all. i'm going to put it a different way, though. people talk about too big to fail. what do you think about too big to manage? we were talking about jamie dimon in the last hour. jpmorgan's a really big institution and lots of things can happen. you, by the way, manage a very large company. a big company and a small company. no question about that. and when you get into a financial company, it's tougher to manage a bigger financial company than a smaller one. and that means, you know, you're going to get surprises, more surprises because more things are happening. big ones can handle the surprises too just like jpmorgan can handle -- that is not a big problem. it would be to a much smaller institution. but things will go wrong at big institutions. and they'll go wrong at small institutions. what you have to worry about is when something overwhelming goes wrong like what happened to freddie and fannie. and those were too big to be managed the way they were managed. the way they were structured. there was a flaw in the structure. so just going back -- go ahead. i just build on that because i want to say there's -- i'm not making light of too big to fail and i'm not going to repeat all the things i've said. but the point i make in the prologue is we've got bigger issues to deal with. right. when we clean up the mess, all the focus on that. i'm much more focused on let's get the work done and in the shadow banking markets. let's finish what we're doing with the money markets, the repo market and most importantly, let's fix fannie and freddie. right. they were a vortex, ground zero of the crisis. and, you know, stabilizing them, i think, even more essential than the bank capital program in t.a.r.p. was stabilizing them. that would have been all she wrote if we'd done that. that was key to get through the night. we needed to fix it -- okay. but if you had to prioritize, we had a government shutdown on our hands, the debt ceiling, entitlements, dealing with taxes, all sorts of issues. where does fannie and freddie fit in all of that? well, they're different issues. we've got -- to me the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, that's this -- that's got to be done. that's not long-term, it's not strategic, it just is necessary incredibly important housekeeping. and if you can't get that done, shows the government can't work.