Building On yesteryear’s willful errors, the Orwellian named “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010”—“the 2,300-plus-page conference bill which is designed to protect households from predatory practices by banks, subprime lenders, brokerages and other financial intermediaries”—entrenches yet more affirmative action in lending, the kind that contributed to this depression.
The fecund female who has set-up the same pigment-based privileges that guided state lenders Freddy and Fanny is Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Carl Horowitz’s Townhall column is extremely edifying (this is the kind of comment I will read on Townhall because it does vital shoe-leather journalism. Ditto Malkin’s work; she does the footwork. The punditocracy’s ignorant opinions I don’t bother with):
“… The measure, in addition to giving the U.S. Treasury the authority to liquidate banks that pose a threat to financial stability (a mixed blessing at best), all but exempts lenders from shutdown if black and other minority borrowers account for high portions of their loan portfolios, especially in minority neighborhoods. The bill states: ‘The orderly liquidation plan shall take into account actions to avoid or mitigate potential adverse effects on low-income, minority or underserved communities affected by the failure of the covered financial company.’ In other words, federal bank examiners should make every effort to keep a failing institution open so long as it underwrites lots of mortgages to the kinds of borrowers instrumental to the disaster in the first place!
There is more. The amended bill would create a Financial Stability Oversight Council headed by the Secretary of the Treasury to consider a struggling financial institution’s ‘importance as a source of credit for low-income, minority or underserved communities’ before any takeover. The measure also would establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion within each of the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve System. Rep. Waters’ amendment is explicit: ‘Each agency shall take affirmative steps to seek diversity in the workplace of the agency, at all levels of the agency.’
All of this looks like quota legislation, even if Rep. Waters can’t quite bring herself to admit as much. And although these diversity-or-else offices wouldn’t be vested with formal enforcement powers, one can be sure that the Justice Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies with a civil rights mandate will find every pretext possible, however flimsy, to crack down on lenders whose practices create disparate impacts by race.”