Bogus Discrimination Charges Led to Subprime Mortgage Crisis

A lot of subprime mortgage loans are defaulting.  A big reason why is that, to avoid discrimination charges, lenders gutted their traditional lending standards in order to loan money to people with bad credit (bad credit is more common in some minority communities, so refusing to lend money to people with bad credit is alleged to have a racially “disparate impact”).  The Community Reinvestment Act, which punishes banks that don’t make loans in high-risk areas, is also a key reason why (it was enacted and then made even more onerous by the very politicians who are now shrieking about the mortgage crisis they helped create). 

Economics Professor Stan Leibovitz explains how this happened in The New York Post.  John Derbyshire comments at National Review’s The Corner, noting that political correctness, not predatory lending, triggered the subprime mortgage crisis.