Korean Job Discussion Forums

[happeningthang]

I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them.

[Jandar]

Whoever wrote that piece never heard of the Morgan Mafia.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/161199

[Ya-ta Boy]

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of exactly who was getting these home loans. Some at least were going to people who were just buying and selling, buying and selling.

[Join Me]

I was thinking of this exact point tonight and have to an extent I agree with it. In America, we started lending to anyone and everyone irregardless of whether they could prove they could pay back the loans. Got a family but no money. Sure, you have a "right" to a home. Common sense got tossed out the window and we are paying for it now.

[mises]

[mises]

[ontheway]

Here is the key to the story and the whole bursting financial bubble:

(from the article)

[Hater Depot]

[Ya-ta Boy]

Minorities a convenient scapegoat for U.S. financial woes

...Several days ago, Neil Cavuto, host of Fox News' Your World, proclaimed, "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster." ...

...The conservative National Review Online trotted out a favorite whipping boy, the Community Reinvestment Act, claiming that the legislation was the result of "racially inflammatory campaigns" that forced banks to "make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets or credit." ...

The CRA - designed to stop banks from "redlining," or withholding loans from entire neighborhoods - has long been under attack by conservatives, but for entirely different reasons. Critics called it vague, contradictory and useless. They claimed it was unfair to banks and thrifts, which were regulated, while other financial institutions were left to lend money as they saw fit.

That's where the argument tying the CRA to the credit crisis breaks down. The lending frenzy developed during the past few years, a period during which banks and thrifts made less than 25 percent of mortgage loans. (The law has been in place for 30 years, during most of which time there was no mortgage meltdown.)

"The heart of the crisis was caused by unregulated and lightly regulated mortgage brokers and independent mortgage bankers and affiliates that are not subject to the CRA. It would be quite odd if an act ... caused institutions not subject to its purview to do things that were inappropriate," said University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr, who has studied this legislation.

I hold no brief for dumb homebuyers, be they white, black or brown. But minority homeowners were frequently the victims of aggressive practices by mortgage brokers who received higher commissions for steering buyers into high-cost, subprime loans, even if the buyer would have qualified for a prime loan. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings.

Again, lenders didn't push those loans to comply with any "affirmative action in lending" programs. They did it to make money. That's the same reason Wall Street's masters of the universe created all those exotic investment vehicles - instruments they didn't understand any better than some homebuyers understood their adjustable rates.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.viewpoint28sep28,0,6004405.story

Looks to me like someone is trying to shift the blame.

[TexasPete]

I think that's all a distraction to blame this mess on "brown people". The fact is, no one put a gun to the heads of the financial institutions forcing them to offer absurd loans. But it's also the case that the people who accepted these absurd loans should have known better. Nobody is faultless in this mess save the people who didn't take out any loans and have good credit (that would be me:D ).