Must-read: Fannie Mae's Easy Credit

Nine years ago, Steven Holmes of the New York Times wrote admiringly of the way Bill Clinton and the Democrats could claim credit for "Eas[ing] Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending."

It amounts to a map of how Bill Clinton and Democrats created this crisis.

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring. [snip]

Fannie Mae officials stressed that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites... [snip]

The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent... [snip]

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers.

Democrats will read this and weep.

[but will anyone else read it? Or hear of it on TV? Highly Recommended > ]

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