Tag: CRA

economics

Geithner’s plan explained

President Barack Hussein Obama tells us: Your warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it has ever been. Because starting today, the United States will stand behind your warranty. This reads like something out of “Atlas Shrugged”. I predict disturbing inflation or so over the next three or four years – and that is if we eventually turn back from this course, or at least stop …

economics

The crisis explained

I have been seeing a lot of references to “a speculative bubble” Nope. They were not speculating. The crisis consisted of people, mostly members of protected minorities with nothing to lose, buying houses they could not afford with borrowed money in the expectation that they would go up, and if they went down, it was the bank’s problem. So the people who bought houses were taking no risk, since mostly …

economics

The cause of the crisis

Capitalism and free markets are prone to bubbles, and a great deal more prone to bubbles when speculators can expect that the government will print as much money as needed to keep the bubble going, but bubbles do not in themselves lead to massive financial defaults, because normally lenders only lend to people who are in a position to repay, even if the bubble pops. If one reads what purport …

economics

How many CRA loans, how much affirmative action payout?

From 2000 to 2007, blacks and hispanics received six hundred and thirteen billion dollars more in home purchase mortgages than they would have received had they received the same proportion of the money that they received in 1999 – a figure that strikingly resembles the total cost of the bailout. In 1999, people warned that CRA loans, affirmative action loans, racial quota loans, began to endanger the financial system Fannie …