From Wikipedia; an explanation on who did what, and when. Look at this with an open mind and it will explain how we got into this mess. I won't point fingers. What's done is done. Warnings were ignored. Judge for yourselves.
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Community Reinvestment Act
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law that requires banks and savings and loan associations to offer credit throughout their entire market area and prohibits them from targeting only wealthier neighborhoods with their services, a practice known as "redlining." The purpose of the CRA is to provide credit, including home ownership opportunities to under-served populations and commercial loans to small businesses. It has been subjected to important regulatory revisions.
Original Act
The CRA was passed into law by the 95th United States Congress in 1977 as a result of national grassroots pressure for affordable housing, and despite considerable opposition from the mainstream banking community.[1] Only one banker, Ron Grzywinski from ShoreBank in Chicago, testified in favor of the act.[2] The CRA mandates that each banking institution be evaluated to determine if it has met the credit needs of its entire community. That record is taken into account when the federal government considers an institution's application for deposit facilities, including mergers and acquisitions after the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 repealed restrictions on interstate banking.[3] However, until 1995 the Act was laxly enforced and banks only were required to advertise in local minority newspapers or sit on the boards of local community groups.[4] The CRA is enforced by the financial regulators (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ("FDIC"), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC"), Office of Thrift Supervision ("OTS"), and the Federal Reserve System).[citation needed]
The bill encouraged mortgage lending through two government sponsored enterprises ("GSEs"). The Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, enables mortgage companies, savings and loans, commercial banks, credit unions, and state and local housing finance agencies to lend to home buyers. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, commonly known as Freddie Mac, buys mortgages on the secondary market and sell them as mortgage-backed securities on the open market.[5] It also charged the Federal Reserve System to implement the CRA through ensuring banks and savings and loans met their CRA obligations.[3]
Clinton Administration Changes of 1995
In early 1993 President Bill Clinton ordered new regulations for the CRA which would increase access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities.[6] The new rules January 31, 1995 and featured: requiring strictly numerical assessments to get a satisfactory CRA rating; using federal home-loan data broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race; encouraging community groups to complain when banks were not loaning enough to specified neighborhood, income group, and race; allowing community groups that marketed loans to target to groups to collect a fee from the banks.[4][7]
The new rules, during a time when many banks were merging and needed to pass the CRA review process to do so, substantially increased the number and aggregate amount of loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers for home loans, some of which were "risky mortgages." Banks set up CRA departments, a CRA consultant industry was created and new financial-services firms helped banks invest in packaged portfolios of CRA loans to ensure compliance. Established and new community groups began marketing such mortgates. The Senate Banking Committee estimted that as of 2000, as a result of CRA, such groups had received $9.5 billion in services and salaries. As of that time such groups also had received tens of billions of dollars in multi-year commitments from banks, including ACORN Housing $760 million; Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America $3 billion; a New Jersey Citizen Action-led coalition $13 billion; the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance $220 million.[4] The number of CRA mortgage loans increased by 39 percent between 1993 and 1998, while other loans increased by only 17 percent.[8][9]
Related rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks. By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market.[5] Due to massive financial losses, on September 7, 2008 the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA.[10]
Bush Administration Changes of 2005
In 2002 there was an interagency review of the effectiveness of the 1995 regulatory changes to the Community Reinvestment Act and new proposals were considered.[7] In 2003, the Bush Administration recommended that a new Department of the Treasury agency should supervise the primary agents guaranteeing subprime loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congressional support was approximately split along Party lines and the proposal eventually failed.[11]
The new CRA regulations proposed in early 2005 were put into effect in July and September of 2005. They included new definitions for "small" and "intermediate small" banks which were subject to less restrictions than formally.[3] The regulations were opposed by a contingent of Democrats[12]
Criticism
Some economists have questioned if CRA originally was, or at least had become, irrelevant because the CRA was not needed to force banks to make profitable loans to a variety of lenders.[13][14][15] Economist Howard Husock writes that a CRA-connected community group The Woodstock Institute found in a survey in the Chicago-area that even banks not subject to CRA tended to loan in a variety of of neighborhoods. He also criticized as an "amateur delivery system" community groups' involvement in marketing loans.[4]
Economist Stan Liebowitz has claimed that banks were forced to loan to consumers who were not credit worthy with "no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant's ability to make payments; no down payment." The chief executive of Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender, is said to have "bragged" that in order to approve minority applications, "lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit."[16]
New America Foundation fellow Robert Gordon[17] countered that approximately half of the loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA and thus had no government obligation to offer credit to minorities. In the later part of the crisis, these mortgage companies made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA banks. Another third of the major subprime lenders were regulated but had very little CRA involvement.[18] Gordon also makes the argument that the weakening of the CRA in 2004 was followed by intensified subprime lending.[18] Austrian economist Thomas DiLorenzo counters Gordon's statistic by arguing that even if half of the subprime loans were made by non-CRA companies, the CRA had still caused tens of billions in defaults on mortgages by unqualified borrowers. He further states that Gordon's statistic ignores that independent mortgage companies are middlemen who sell subprime loans to banks that are in turn regulated by the CRA.[19]
Ellen Seidman, the former director of the US Office of Thrift Supervision, who also works at the New America Foundation,[20] has stated her belief that the CRA did not have an effect on the United States housing bubble. She observes that CRA banks were particularly warned to make responsible investments, citing one of her own speeches as an example. She noted that if unregulated independent mortgage companies make subprime loans, affiliated CRA banks should not be able to count them for CRA purposes although she did not indicate whether this practice currently occurs.[21] An analysis by the law firm of Traiger & Hinckley, LLP, which counsels financial services entities on fair lending and Community Reinvestment Act compliance, concluded that CRA banks were less likely than other lenders to make high cost loans or to foreclose in certain metropolitan areas; they also were more likely to retain their original loans.[22]
Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has partially attributed the ongoing subprime mortgage crisis to legislation such as the Community Reinvestment Act.[23] A Wall Street Journal editorial recently argued that the law compelled banks to make loans to poor borrowers who often could not repay them and that this contributed in part to the subprime crisis.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
