I meant to blog this when it first came out, but Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times writer Paul Krugman has as good an evisceration of the right-wing talking point that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the subprime bubble as I’ve seen. I’ll leave it to him:
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An ambitious plan to update the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act that supporters hope to see signed into law in 2010 comes amid charges that this legislation was responsible for nothing less than the subprime crisis and the resulting collapse of the residential real estate market.
The plan, sponsored by More…
This time in Memphis. In fact, city officials are so fired up that they’ve filed a lawsuit charging the mortgage-loan giant with discrimination. The New York Times reports:
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, marshaled a raft of statistics to argue that Wells Fargo offered one
While one might have expected Washington to recover some civility after the mudslinging of the campaign season, the year instead saw the rise of the “just asking” paranoiac style on Fox News, the return of serial health care misinformer Betsy McCaughey, and the accusation “You lie!” hurled at the More…
When is this ever going to end? Conservative lawmakers are seizing on ACORN’s troubles to once again go after the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law that somehow became a scapegoat for the housing crisis last year, the AP reports.
The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was intended to end
Journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the recession’s racial divide, making the point that the hard times are hitting the black community with particular fervor. In a New York Times piece this weekend, Ehrenreich correctly pointed out that even high-income blacks were more likely than More…
On Monday, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute slams the proposal for a Financial Products Safety Commission, using a Washington Post op-ed to call it elitist and contend it would limit financial choices to sophisticated consumers.
Are consumers “protected” when they are denied the opportunity to buy products
Worth noting from yesterday’s House Judicial subcommittee hearing on the foreclosure crisis: Republicans just can’t shake the temptation to blame the Community Reinvestment Act for causing the current economic turmoil.
You’ve heard the critics’ argument before: The CRA hasn’t so much empowered low-income borrowers as it has More…
Here’s a huge pat on the back and a show of support for Barry Ritholtz, who truly has had it with those who keep clinging to the widely discredited belief that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing crisis. Ritholtz writes at The Big Picture that he’s offering a More…
Friend of the site Charles Morris points out something many people might have missed in former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s testimony Thursday before Congress.
Headlines noted that Greenspan acknowledged his misplaced faith in the ability of free markets to correct themselves. But he also did something More…
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