Economics, Historically, History, Politics

2000 Report On The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown

Back in 2000, Howard Husok wrote in the City-Journal about how the Clinton Presidency and the left-wing groups created a shake down of banks.  It is a thorough read and as you read it you realize how the housing bubble and collapse came to be.  Here is the lead in with link to read more at the bottom.

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities by Howard Husock

The Community Reinvestment Act funnels billions to left-wing activists, while threatening to destabilize lower-middle-class neighborhoods.

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being.

The CRA’s premise sounds unassailable: helping the poor buy and keep homes will stabilize and rebuild city neighborhoods. As enforced today, though, the law portends just the opposite, threatening to undermine the efforts of the upwardly mobile poor by saddling them with neighbors more than usually likely to depress property values by not maintaining their homes adequately or by losing them to foreclosure. The CRA’s logic also helps to ensure that inner-city neighborhoods stay poor by discouraging the kinds of investment that might make them better off.

READ MORE BY CLICKING HERE

https://www.city-journal.org/html/trillion-dollar-bank-shakedown-bodes-ill-cities-12096.htm

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