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Stop Blaming Poor Minorities for the Economic Crisis

From this Slate article about the true causes of the mortgage meltdown:

Investment banks and insurance companies run by centimillionaires blow up, and it’s the fault of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and poor minorities? These arguments are generally made by people who read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and ignore the rest of the paper—economic know-nothings whose opinions are informed mostly by ideology and, occasionally, by prejudice.

First of all, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) doesn’t require no-money-down mortgages (or any of the other, weird mortgages sold during the height of the debacle), completely defenestrate underwriting standards, or encourage mortgage brokers to act like asshole used-car salesmen.

Second, the CRA didn’t force the credit-rating agencies to rate packages of subprime debt as high-grade.

Finally, the institutions that created the ridiculously massive growth of the subprime market weren’t banks that fell under the CRA. They were unregulated businesses like Argent and American Home Mortgage, who were not regulated by the Federal Reserve or any other agency that monitored compliance with the CRA.