Free Republic

In 2007, West Gate Bank paid no premiums to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. In 2008, the Lincoln bank paid $160,000. This year, with a special emergency assessment, which was finalized on Friday, President Carl Sjulin is estimating West Gate’s premium to be around $530,000. “It’s a burden,” Sjulin said. It’s also bitter medicine for banks that did little or nothing destructive to contribute to the unhealthy state of the nation’s banking industry. “It’s a very difficult pill to swallow for Nebraska bankers,” Sjulin said. “We didn’t have anything to do with it, but we’re paying for it.” That’s a...

Uncovering the roots of the disastrous home mortgage bubble that popped last year will keep economic historians busy for decades. Yet, one factor has so far been largely overlooked: the bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities. More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness. The chickens have finally come home to roost. About half of all mortgages for blacks and Hispanics are subprime, versus...