Hat tip Steve Sailer who provides the breakdown of defaults.
The proximate cause of the international crisis is that the US$, the international reserve currency, lost much credibility. The proximate cause of the US$ losing credibility was massive defaults by blacks and Hispanics, and the proximate cause of the massive defaults by blacks and Hispanics was affirmative action lending to people whom I could tell at a glance from twenty paces were highly unlikely to repay their debts.
In the last days before the crash, I saw in California a steady parade of people buying expensive houses no money down whose own mothers must have been reluctant to lend them ten dollars. Lax though credit standards were, not one of them would have been able to borrow money had he been non Hispanic white.
Laderman and Reid of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco have done the unthinkably politically incorrect, and though they do not directly reveal the proportion of defaults that were affirmative action, they tell us:
We also find that race has an independent effect on foreclosure even after controlling for borrower income and credit score. In particular, African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers.
They also argue that CRA loans were just fine:
a CRA lender significantly decreases the likelihood of foreclosure
They obtained this contradictory result by controlling for race – in other words, they are not saying CRA loans were unlikely to default, but that a CRA loan made to a non hispanic white is (unsurprisingly) unlikely to default – in other words, affirmative action loans have no harmful effect, indeed beneficial effect, to the extent that they were not in fact affirmative action loans.
They do not directly tell us what proportion of defaulters were black and Hispanic, but since the great majority of defaulters were subprime, and 77% of subprime borrowers were black and Hispanic, and blacks and Hispanics three times more likely to default than whites …
Tags: CRA, crisis, race, the great minority mortgage meltdown