lending practice

Mortgage Crisis and Racism: It's Worse than You Thought

This doesn't surprise me at all, indeed, I would name it a "feature" and not a "bug." Democracy Now!

A startling new report has predicted the subprime mortgage crisis will cause people of color to lose up to $213 billion, leading to the greatest loss of wealth in modern U.S. history. The figure appears in a new report from United for a Fair Economy called “Foreclosed: The State of the Dream 2008.” The group accuses mortgage lenders of deliberately targeting the poor and people of color with high-cost loans.

Predatory lending is as old as 40 Acres and a Mule. Poor people are the easiest to scam when it comes to complex financial vehicles, and I would like more bloggers to speak about this angle of "how we got this crisis."

It's pretty clear that greed, willful ignorance, Bushist "logic" and a criminal lack of regulation brought about the mortgage crisis. But so too did racism- again and again I've read of poor and brown and black people conned into believing they could afford mortgages when they couldn't. Now this report confirms this endemic of racist lending practices. Want to impress me, Obama, Hillary? Speak about this angle of the mess one of you will be cleaning up soon.

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