by Dan
It’s about time they exercised more scrutiny over credit. We would not be in this subprime mess if they had been more careful. But you can’t put the blame entirely on the lenders, or “greedy lenders,” as the Democrats call them. No lender ever wanted to make a loan to a person unlikely to repay the loan. They were forced to by pressure groups representing minorities and by Democrats threatening to pass legislation. Remember a few years ago during the housing boom when the front page of every newspaper warned that the boom was leaving some people out? Some people who had bad credit, mostly minorities, were being discriminated against. The word most often used was “redlining,” as in whole neighborhoods being discriminated against. Those neighborhoods were always the neighborhoods of minorities. So, in order to stave off punitive action by Congress, mainly by Democrats in Congress, the lenders caved in and made loans to people outside of the standard credit parameters. It was not really a racial issue. The lenders never cared about skin color. All they cared about was whether the loan would be repaid, and it just so happened that people who had bad credit histories were often members of minority groups.