Not So

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com One would think that at least two lessons would have been learned from the financial crisis: stop pushing loans to people who cannot or will not pay them back and stop offering loans with "flexible underwriting criteria." Not so. The Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are pushing their most audacious plan yet expanding the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which helped spark the crisis in the first place. As our old Hoover Institution friend Peter Schweizer points out in his Forbes column "Expanding the CRA," in the nine years running up to the economic crisis, banks operating under the constraints of the CRA to offer more than $4.2 trillion in loans to people they would ordinarily not lend money to. Now they want to expand the CRA to cover credit unions, other mortgage lenders and insurance companies. This would mean trillions more in what Peter refers to as affirmative action lending.