What happens when credit markets seize up? We are beginning to see the result now: Businesses can’t expand or don’t open, houses aren’t bought or sold, and economic growth slows to a crawl. In minority communities, where banks once welcomed residents’ deposits but refused to lend to them, similar economic stagnation resulted.
So it’s bizarre to see some commentators heap blame for the subprime mortgage meltdown on the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA is the Carter administration-era legislation that required banks taking minority residents’ deposits to also make good-faith efforts to extend loans to them. To make the CRA the boogeyman in the nation’s worst financial crisis in decades essentially is to favor redlining as a preventative against economic malaise.
That’s just plain wrong.
Blame game: Pundits are wrong to fault lending to the poor for the subprime mortgage meltdown | Editorial | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.
Why does a belief that all government is bad make it so easy for conservative to find fault in all government…Even when the numbers do not add up? I know the past few years have made it easy to blame government. But really, it’s the appointment of incompetent administrators that’s the issue. Add in the belief that regulations are bad and therefor do not need to be enforcced and you have a recipe for disaster…
Unregulated, nontraditional banking firms selling bad mortgages are what drove this crisis. Not CRA, not Fannie, not Freddie, not even ACORN. Executives making millions, wanting to make more millions, ignoring the rules of good business if not the law drove the entire world to the brink of finiancial colapse.
The dishonesty off it all comes home in the pages of the MSM and on the Tube when the talking heads try to apportion out blame on everyone equally. Everyone did not have a hand in this collapse. Everyone did not live outside their means. Everyone did not bend the rules to try and not pay their “unpatiotic” taxes. Put the blame where it belongs…Please.
Gary, I don’t believe either Obama or anyone on his staff aren’t aware that Democrat-led government mandated lending programs with quotas that turn a blind eye to credit-worthiness were the beginning of this debacle. This includes the CRA, Fannie/Freddie, etc. as well as Wall St. I know this because I work in the banking industry, and I’ve seen the data and policies.
Unfortunately, race is the biggest driver of loan defaults as shown by the Federal Housing Authority and independent researchers, and the government has required alternative rules for underwriting criteria in poor credit-worthy neighborhoods.
You know Jim, we can argue this till the cows come home but you will never admit that the problem started with the deregulation of the financial markets during the 90’s , and , I’ll never buy it was the Democrats fault for insisting on banking fairness.
Since neighborhoods are pretty much still segregated by race and economics both, your comment about race being the biggest driver of loan defaults could be construed the other way…