That is the crux of the whole argument, after all, that easing minority lending to increase minority home ownership caused the subprime mortgage crisis. Were that true, minority defaults should have significantly outpaced others; any stats supporting that, or is this just more faith-based history?

Fannie and Freddie were chasing profits from lending as investment, to satisfy their private execs, rather than profits from lending as an end in itself.


Housing prices had already gone WAY up, as you ought to remember if you were a mortgage broker at the time. I recall seeing national news stories on TV in the late '90s discussing the increasingly common practice of people buying houses based on skyrocketing prices for the sole purpose of "flipping" them a year or so later when the price shot even higher. I particularly recall reporters noting at the end of the story that it was creating an overvalued overspeculated housing bubble that could crater the market when it burst. That was five years before the CRA.


No one put a gun to those banks heads, despite their insistence to the contrary; a number of them had loan officers begging them not to issue loans they (but not the borrowers) KNEW were bad, but the banks insisted on it, because they were just going to dump the load on someone else as a credit default swap anyway, making the default a GOOD thing for them (since it was the only way they could make a profit.) Let us not conflate Freddie and Fannie with banking in general, because they are not, or should not be, identical.


You make it sound like Freddie and Fannie guarantee every bank loan in the US. If anything, it looks like the opposite is true:


Welcome to Egypt; enjoy your view of the river.