community reinvestment act

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 redlining, a practice in which banks in [...]

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 whites to wind up with higher cost subprime [...]

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 and services that are available to others? [...]

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 lowered lending standards, thus forcing banks to make the [...]

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 debate challenge, with a prize of [...]

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 else — he didn’t point to the Community [...]

At Economist’s View, Mark Thoma brings up a subject no one seems to want to talk about anymore – helping people with modest incomes buy homes.
In the housing crisis, poor people — of all the likely suspects — are playing the role of scapegoats. Conservatives support the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act, an [...]

The folks over at The Corner think Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin went off base a bit last night when she blamed the housing crisis on predatory lenders. They wanted her to go after irresponsible borrowers, the Community Reinvestment Act – they call it the Carter/Clinton CRA – and the Democratic supporters of Fannie [...]

Charles Morris checks in with us to call the charge that poverty activists fueled the mortgage crisis “absurd.”
Our story Tuesday outlined that argument, in which conservatives blame the Community Reinvestment Act for the flood of subprime lending that led to the housing meltdown.
Morris, however, says it’s clear that competition drove bad lending. Consider a 2005 [...]

Media Matters weighs in on the topic we wrote about Tuesday on TWI — the fact that blaming low-income and minority borrowers for the housing crisis is picking up speed as reason for the cause of the housing crisis.
Conservatives are blaming the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law, by saying it forced banks to make [...]