"It's all Whitey's fault! First, they let us burn our city down, now they let us take out ridiculous mortgages!"
***SIGH***
Sounds to me they’re saying blacks are too stupid to buy a house.
Interesting isn’t it that liberal policies (because that is what the Pelosi-Reid congress gave us) such as the take over of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (On September 7, 2008, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director James B. Lockhart III announced he had put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA (see Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The action has been described as “one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades”.) have only hurt the minority communities and never helped them?
It's not about race, dummies...
It's about too large a percentage of that community being ignorant, arrogant, privileged, indolent thugs!
That goes for the Mayor, too...
The ONLY “penalties” in mortgage finance are the result of credit ratings.
WRONG!!!!! Banks were FORCED by LAW to write mortgages to the "under-privileged" (read that: BLACK and HISPANIC minorities) and accept as statements of fact, a mortgage applicant's income, when that applicant could not prove how much they made in a month.
Banks wrote those mortgages BY FORCE OF LAW and then quickly packaged them up and sold them off to Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac because both Fannie and Freddie BY FORCE OF LAW were mandated by the Federal Government to buy every mortgage presented to them.
Anyone who wants to know why the mortgage industry "blew up" the banks and we experienced one of the most horrific downturns in the housing industry need look no further than the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT which imposed the rules through threat of legal action, upon every bank in the country.
I worked in the Mortgage division of one of the country's largest Mortgage Lenders while that bubble built. We all knew it wasn't sustainable, yet the Government forced all the banks to keep writing loans to people with no documented source of income.
WTF did the stupid Government think was going to happen? And to blame it on the banks when it was GOVERNMENT MANDATED to write loans to people with no source of documented income was a disaster waiting to happen.
Not a single one of these people were forced to take out a loan that they couldn’t pay back. In fact it was DemocRats who coerced banks into making risky loans.
What nonsenses! Minorities were hardest hit, but it was because they bought homes they couldn’t afford and took on ‘liar’ mortgage loans they couldn’t pay off.
Totally misleading.
They had horrible credit or no documentation of income and thus were only offered crappy deals.
It had nothing to do with their skin color.
Completely schizophrenic article: every other sentence whines about predatory lending while the other half of the sentences whine about “discriminatory” lending practices, but I doubt the average Slimes reader will pick on the implausible dichotomy of these two sets of excuses, both of which naturally supposedly impact blacks disproportionately, because apparently blacks are, what, more stupid than non-blacks when it comes to home loans?
“Racial Penalties in Baltimore Mortgages”
Well, I’m glad SOMEONE finally figured out why the murder and violent crime rate doubled in Baltimore since the mayor ordered her police to provide plenty of “space to destroy”, and apparently the reason has nothing to do with the fact that the police arrest rates were halved during the last month, but it’s all because of “predatory” lending practices over the last few years. Apparently, all of those “predatory” loans just came due or something during the last month.
I'm calling possible BS on this one. I'm sure there are people who'd do this (regardless of the race of the borrower), but someone across town will give you the best deal your credit will qualify you for. I'm sure there are cases where this happened to blacks, but till I see some real statistics, I'm not convinced this was done to minorities any more than it was done to whites, given equal credit histories.
These borrowers weren't steered away from "safe, traditional" loans because they weren't qualified for them in the first place. They were sub-prime borrowers, at best, and many of them had no place borrowing $$ (either on a purchase or refi). NINA loans (no income, no asset verification) were a joke.
Also, during this 2nd time period in the mortgage business, I never once met a borrower in person. It was all done over the phone & via the mail, so I never knew (or cared) what their ethnic background was. (Yes, it was a section on the last page of the app, but it's not something to which I paid any attention - it would've been illegal & discriminatory if I had.)
Only the government is permitted to engage predatory lending. (What is the national debt now?)
OMG?
or BFD?
CRA and HUD enforcers (headed by Andrew Cuomo) forced mortgage companies to make sketchy loans and FNMA and FHLMC scooped them up.
And, as another poster pointed out, nobody was forced to take out these mortgage.
Since when does one’s credit report rely on skin color? If I had gobs of money to lend out I would only lend to people who are likely to pay me back, otherwise I’d be a poor and failed businessman.