They gave your mortgage to a less qualified minority...

"...cleared of impropriety but criticized for poor judgment..."

"...cleared of impropriety but criticized for poor judgment..."

Going very much against the media meme that the current financial crisis is all George W. Bush and the Republicans’ fault, Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC’s Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been “resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” True. President Bush warned about reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae 17 times this year alone. John McCain’s reform bill was blocked by dems in 2005. Thank you, Bill Clinton!

Every account I've ever read about the thing indicates that McCain was totally innocent.

Before I turn to potential interventions, I want to make one final point. There has been a tendency to conflate the current problems in the subprime market with CRA-motivated lending, or with lending to low-income families in general. I believe it is very important to make a distinction between the two. Most of the loans made by depository institutions examined under the CRA have not been higher-priced loans, and studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households. We should not view the current foreclosure trends as justification to abandon the goal of expanding access to credit among low-income households, since access to credit, and the subsequent ability to buy a home, remains one of the most important mechanisms we have to help low-income families build wealth over the long term.

Put simply, the freezing up of the credit markets doesn’t have anything to do with either affirmative action or illegal immigration, and people who believe it does are on a par with the conspiracy theorists who think fluoridation is a Chicom plot.

When you look at the data, it’s true that minorities are slightly over-represented in the sub-prime mortgage market. Yet, whites (non-minorities) received 72.5% of subprime mortgages. Blacks got 16.2% of subprime mortgages, which isn’t all that different from the 12.4% of the general population that blacks comprise. The Hispanics about whom Malkin is so hysterical got only 6.2% of subprime mortgages, significantly less than their 14.8% of the general population. But you don’t find an analysis of that data at blogs like those of Malkin or Krikorian.