[StBernard] Is it Dems or GOPs?

Westley Annis Westley at da-parish.com
Mon Sep 22 09:01:25 EDT 2008


JR,

What a GREAT commentary! Thanks.

John Scurich


-----Original Message-----
As a retired banker (40 years) I am compelled to clarify the nightmare
created for lenders via the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA came about,
whether politicians will admit to it or not, as a result of a putlizer prize
winning article in the Atlanta Constitution (possibly the Atlanta Journal; I
don't remember which) which demonstrated how minorities were denied housing.
The biggest flaw with the "analysis" was that it focused on the race of the
applicants, and NOT ON THE APPLICANT'S CREDIT HISTORY. From personal
experience I can tell you that every state and federal examiner I ever came
into contact with evaluated the number of declinations, by race, even though
the majority of minorities had multiple derogatory trade histories. It was
always a battle with the examiners to get them to look at credit histories,
as opposed to simply reviewing the race of the applicants. Fortunately, if
you had the baxx's to stand your ground and insist that the CRA enforced the
practice of equitable, FAIR lending, the examiners would eventually back
down. Whenever I conducted in-house training sessions I had to impress upon
our junior lenders that their job was to make prudent lending decisions,
regardless of race. You would be surprised at how many of them asked whether
or not we had to make exceptions to satisfy the Community Reinvestment Act.

JR





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