By Ian Jobling • 2/7/08
This article by Stan Liebowitz on the mortgage crisis that is wreaking such havoc on the stock market lays bare its real cause: decades of “anti-discrimination” activism that pressured banks to lower lending standards so that minorities could get more home loans.
In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of “redlining” - claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.
In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications - but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.
The facts bear Liebowitz out: as I showed in The Improvident Races, blacks and Hispanics aren’t good at saving money.
Let us savor the following irony:
Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.
Who was that virtuous lender? Why—Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, recently in the headlines as it hurtled toward bankruptcy.
So now are the minority groups sorry for having undermined the American financial system? Of course not. In fact, they’re on the offensive again. Now they are suing the banks for having issued minorities high-risk loans.
I guess you just can’t win if you’re a banker. But then, bankers are all rich white guys, so who cares?
Of course, in a sense, minorities won’t be responsible for the majority of mortgage defaults, as the large majority of all mortgages go to whites. But in another sense, minorities are responsible because they pushed for the lower lending standards that irresponsible whites took advantage of.
The whole mess augments a point that I’ve made before: integrating non-whites denatures white societies by corrupting their values. The problem isn’t just that the non-whites are a drag on our society; racial integration degrades the morals of whites as well. White societies became what they are because we held ourselves to strict standards, and those standards worked because whites were, by and large, up to them. But the standards don’t work for minorities, so they have to go out the window in the name of “inclusiveness” and non-discrimination. When the standards decay, the moral irresponsibility not only of minorities, but also of whites is given free rein to wreck our society. Whites act like black people more and more as time goes on, not only in their improvident finances, but also in their musical tastes, sexual behavior, and general reckless hedonism.