So some Dutch teachers’ union that a year before was buying ultra-safe U.S. Treasury bonds in 2006 runs into a Goldman salesman who offers them a different, “just as safe” AAA-rated investment that, at the moment anyway, just happens to be earning a much higher return than treasuries. Next thing you know, a bunch of teachers in Holland are betting their retirement nest eggs on a bunch of meth addicted “homeowners” in Texas and Arizona.
I’m always amazed at these people who think the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the Housing and Credit Crisis of… 2007. You’d have to be as dumb as a bag of hammers to think that a law gets passed in 1977, magically does not affect the housing market adversely for 30 years, and then suddenly explodes in toxic leverage and brings down the entire international financial system a generation later.
For the last time: the Community Reinvestment Act DID NOT FORCE BANKS TO LEND TO UNWORTHY BORROWERS. It did not force banks to open branches in bad neighborhoods or rescue “burned out” communities. It did not actually force banks to do anything at all, as a matter of fact. All the act did was specify that if you wanted to get FDIC insurance, you had to actually lend to the people whose deposits you held. And this was not mandated by quotas or numerical targets. There was no specific mechanism for this at all. The act just forced banks to be subject to periodic reviews by the banks’ primary regulator, whoever that happened to be — the Fed, the OCC, the FDIC, and the state banking institutions. These regulators were supposed to look at the banks’ lending history and make sure that they weren’t refusing to lend to their own depositors, a practice that was common in ghetto bank branches through the seventies.
Since we have all seen how completely and totally ineffectual the banking regulators have been in the last fifteen years in enforcing even the most basic criminal statutes, it again strains the imagination to conceive of the mind that would believe that somehow all these different ineffectual regulators ignored all other laws for decades but chose to hammer the banks with the CRA, forcing them all to give out loans to poor black people.
It’s not true and it’s absurd. The CRA, again, did not force anyone to make any kind of loan. I’m going to quote from the Federal Reserve’s own description of the law:
“Nor does the law require institutions to make high-risk loans that jeopardize their safety. To the contrary, the law makes it clear that an institution’s CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner.”
This crisis had nothing to do with the CRA and everything to do with the collapse of mortgage underwriting standards, coupled with advances in the technology of securitization, which allowed banks to lend to unworthy borrowers and then sell off these dicey mortgages to secondary buyers. The driving forces in this crisis were bonuses for mortgage brokers and appraisers, underwriting fees for the securitizing firms, and commissions for the institutional fixed-income fund managers who bought this stuff from the investment banks. It was a purely market-driven process and had absolutely nothing to do with government-mandated social engineering.
It blows my mind, the lengths people will go to to blame disasters on liberals and minorities. The really ironic thing is that if you want to blame the Democrats for this stuff, there are plenty of real misdeeds to bash them for. The fact that the Limbaugh/Hannity crowd decided to focus on a basically irrelevant law like the CRA shows that they know their audiences will buy pretty much anything, so long as the punchline is black slobs on welfare breaking the back of hardworking America.
I’ve got to add something else, because this is just so ridiculous, this pegging the financial crisis on the CRA.
First of all, the agencies that conduct CRA examinations have absolutely no enforcement powers. None — zero. Even if you flunk your CRA examination, you cannot be ordered to do anything.
In fact, the government chose to address this issue in 1989 by making the results of CRA exams public. The idea here is that you’d see a little bit of a deterrent here — in the absence of real enforcement powers, banks might at least be embarrassed into lending to their depositors if the fact that they didn’t lend to minorities was explicitly made public.
On the other hand, the government didn’t want CRA exams to be such a huge burden. So in 1999, as part of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, they mandated that CRA exams would only take place once every four or five years for all banks that were deemed “Satisfactory” or better in their exams.
In the period 2002-2008, state member banks evaluated by the Fed scored the following: 15.8% were “outstanding,” 83.7% were “satisfactory,” and only .5% had a “needs to improve” or worse rating.
So [according to some] the housing bubble was caused by half of one percent of all banks being so embarrassed by public disclosure of their CRA rating that they went bonkers and started forking over million-dollar mortgages to every crackhead in sight.
