Faun
Diamond Member
- Nov 14, 2011
- 125,864
- 90,693
- 3,635
Probably not, but that's like asking if the Twin Towers have collapsed had two commercial jets not been flown into them.Riiiiiight .... because it was really a law in place for 70 years which caused the crisis.Oh, my ... your own link!And I showed you a vast majority of the toxic loans which cratered the economy were not subjected to CRA regulations. 6% of higher priced residential toxic loans were CRA loans and zero percent of commercial toxic loans were CRA loans.
Edward Pinto
Edward Pinto, a consultant to the mortgage-finance industry, was the chief credit officer at Fannie Mae in the 1980s.
Yes, the CRA Is Toxic
So why is Congress thinking about expanding it?
Yes, the CRA Is Toxic
1. The question of how well CRA loans have performed is of vital importance because of the trillions of dollars in such lending. During the first 15 years of the act’s existence, total announced commitments under the CRA totaled $9 billion. But starting in 1992, volume exploded. Over the next 16 years, from 1992 to 2008, announced CRA commitments totaled $6 trillion. And incredible though it may seem, the same federal regulators who forced the CRA on banks have neglected to track the performance of trillions of dollars of loans made to satisfy it. But there is a strong prima facie case that they constitute toxic lending—that is, lending that leads to unsustainable loans, resulting in an unacceptable level of foreclosures.
2. …approximately 50 percent of CRA loans for single-family residences were nevertheless made to borrowers who made down payments of 5 percent or less or had low credit scores—characteristics that indicated high credit risk. Whether or not anyone called these loans “subprime,” in other words, the chances are good that many of them have defaulted or remain at high risk of doing so.
3. Though the feds, again, haven’t collected figures for CRA loans’ performance as a whole, we do have statistics from a few lenders that are troubling indeed. In Cleveland, Third Federal Savings and Loan has a 35 percent delinquency rate on its CRA-mandated “Home Today” loans, versus a 2 percent delinquency rate on its non–Home Today portfolio. Chicago’s Shorebank—the nation’s first community development bank, with largely CRA-related loans on its books—has a 19 percent delinquency and nonaccrual rate for its portfolio of first-mortgage loans for single-family residences. And Bank of America said in 2008 that while its CRA loans constituted 7 percent of its owned residential-mortgage portfolio, they represented 29 percent of that portfolio’s net losses.
4. Over the last 20 years, the percentage of conventional home-purchase mortgages made with the borrower putting 5 percent or less down more than tripled, from 8 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2007. Adding to the default risk: of these loans with 5 percent or less down, the average down payment declined from 5 percent to 3 percent of the loan’s value.
5. As for Fannie and Freddie, most of the loans with 5 percent or less down that they had acquired by 2005 had down payments of 3 percent or even no down payment at all. From 1992 to 2007, the two entities acquired over $3.1 trillion in low-down-payment or credit-impaired loans and private securities backed by credit-impaired loans—and these are performing horribly: the delinquency rate on Fannie’s and Freddie’s remaining $1.1 trillion in such high-risk loans is 15.5 percent as of this past June 30, about 6.5 times the rate on the entities’ traditionally underwritten loans. All this risky lending, of course, drove the nation’s homeownership rate up and inflated a housing-price bubble.
6. Taxpayers deserve to know why not one regulator had the common sense to track the performance of CRA loans. They also deserve to know why the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and other regulators appear to have no idea how trillions of dollars in CRA loans are performing now.
7. Incredibly, the House Financial Services Committee is considering legislation that would broaden the scope of the CRA. Before it takes any action on HR 1479—which would expand the CRA’s mandates from banks to bank subsidiaries, mortgage bankers, credit unions, insurance companies, and other nonbank financial institutions—the committee should demand that regulators request detailed CRA performance data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as from the four banks that have announced 94 percent of the nation’s $6 trillion in CRA commitments: Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America. These six institutions should be able to provide performance information for an estimated 70 percent of outstanding CRA loans.
The Clinton administration changed this state of affairs dramatically. Ignoring the sweeping transformation of the banking industry since the CRA was passed, the Clinton Treasury Department's 1995 regulations made getting a satisfactory CRA rating much harder. The new regulations de-emphasized subjective assessment measures in favor of strictly numerical ones. Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A's for effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would count. Where and to whom have home loans been made?
Crucially, the new CRA regulations also instructed bank examiners to take into account how well banks responded to complaints. The old CRA evaluation process had allowed advocacy groups a chance to express their views on individual banks, and publicly available data on the lending patterns of individual banks allowed activist groups to target institutions considered vulnerable to protest. But for advocacy groups that were in the complaint business, the Clinton administration regulations offered a formal invitation.
"To avoid the possibility of a denied or delayed application," advises the NCRC in its deadpan tone, "lending institutions have an incentive to make formal agreements with community organizations." By intervening—even just threatening to intervene—in the CRA review process, left-wing nonprofit groups have been able to gain control over eye-popping pools of bank capital, which they in turn parcel out to individual low-income mortgage seekers. A radical group called ACORN Housing has a $760 million commitment from the Bank of New York; the Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America has a $3-billion agreement with the Bank of America; a coalition of groups headed by New Jersey Citizen Action has a five-year, $13-billion agreement with First Union Corporation. Similar deals operate in almost every major U.S. city. Observes Tom Callahan, executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, which has $220 million in bank mortgage money to parcel out, "CRA is the backbone of everything we do."
The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities
The CRA forced banks to give NINJA loans.
Or else.
BTW...
Had Democrats not infected the private housing economy, and created Fanny and Freddie....
....would there have been a mortgage meltdown?
“CRA was not the cause of the crisis”
I love it when you rightards destroy your own arguments.
You can run but you can't hide.
I said this was the cause:
Had Democrats not infected the private housing economy, and created Fanny and Freddie....
....would there have been a mortgage meltdown?
I said it here:
1. Democrat FDR shredded the Constitution....ignoring article I, section 8, the enumerated powers.
He created GSE's Fannie and Freddie to do something the Constitution didn't authorize: meddle in housing.
2. Democrat Carter....the CRA, constraining banking policy
3. Democrat Clinton....strengthened the CRA
Under Clinton, HUD threatened banks, again, to give unrequited loans.
Henchmen: Democrats Cisneros and Cuomo.
4. Democrats Frank and Dodd barred any governmental discipline in this area.
That's the CliffNotes version.
Or...you could simply say Democrats.
4. Democrats Frank and Dodd barred any governmental discipline in this area.
Cite the bill(s) they blocked.......
BTW.....
Had Democrats not infected the private housing economy, and created Fanny and Freddie....
....would there have been a mortgage meltdown?
For 60+ years, the GSEs performed fine with no problems. It was only after the Federal Fund rate fell to under 2% in 2002 and then to 1% in 2003 that the floodgates of subprime loans opened.
THAT is what caused the collapse because so many people with little to no equity walked away from their mortgages (and second mortgages, in many cases) after their 1% ARMS quadrupled to more than 4% in 2006.