Trump is moving to cut public access to information on how, and to whom, banks loan money

[riversedge]

Trump Wants to Make Red-lining Easier

The administration is moving to cut public access to information on how, and to whom, banks loan money.

https://progressive.org/op-eds/trump-wants-to-make-red-lining-easier-Kristipati-190510/

by Preeti Vissa Kristipati

May 10, 2019



Redlining – the practice of denying loans to home buyers and others based on their race or ethnic background – has been illegal for decades.

But, last year, the investigative news outlet Reveal published a massive investigation strongly suggesting that redlining continues today. Now, the Trump Administration is moving to cut public access to the information that helped Reveal produce its report.

Reveal’s reporters spent a full year analyzing 31 million records collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), a law passed in 1975 to give policymakers the information needed to identify and combat lending discrimination. Under HMDA, banks and other mortgage lenders must report information like the type of property, the loan amount, and the sex, race and ethnicity of borrowers.

Reveal found that African Americans and Latinos—and in some locations Asian Americans and Native Americans, too—were far more likely to be turned down for conventional mortgages than white borrowers. That pattern remained even after controlling for factors like household income and the amount of the loan in relation to that income.

Reporting requirements under HMDA were updated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act and again by the Obama Administration to give regulators a clearer picture of what’s happening. The updated rules required lenders to report every loan’s interest rate and the relationship between an applicant’s income and total amount of debt the would-be borrower was taking on. They also required more detail on ethnicity—like whether an Asian American borrower, for example, was of Chinese or Cambodian heritage.

Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—formerly a tough consumer watchdog that’s fast becoming a bankers’ lapdog—has proposed new rules that would roll back the information requirements added by the Obama Administration. The bureau says it will close a web portal that has allowed easy public access to this information, giving vague promises to eventually develop a new tool for this purpose.

The proposed updates would exempt some lenders, such as smaller banks and credit unions, from having to report at all—even though some of them make more loans to low-income borrowers than do major banks. The administration claims these changes will provide “much needed relief” from supposed regulatory burdens.

While lenders no longer draw red lines on maps, the data reveals they still often decline loans to black people and Latinos or steer them into high-cost subprime loans.

But this makes no sense.....................................

[safeinOhio]

1. The Publican Party...

3 steps backwards for every step forward.

[duforsure]

2. Only three groups come to mind when something like this is suggested

republicans , crooks, and liars. When its really bad they're all three.

[watoos]

3. There is undoubtedly some small print in there,

that will benefit Trump.

[sop]

8. I wonder if that small print retroactively affects

Trump's Deutsche Bank loan information?

[jayschool2013]

4. More great journalism

There are so many excellent journalists doing amazing work out there.

Please share and spread the original links as well as the aggregators.

Here's Reveal's original investigation.

[lark]

5. Remember who and what he is and this makes total sense to his worldview.

Remember - everything is always and only about him, his hate, his profit, his revenge, etc. In this case, he and his father been held personally responsible for discriminating in their housing against blacks. So, he wants he law changed so that he and Kushner and all the other rich entitled asshole bigots can cheat in the dark and not get caught. He's deregulating his own racist hate just like they are letting rapists have child raising privileges and are imposing no or almost no sentence on white men who are rapists. There's even talk deep in the rw hell that exists in this country of making rape legal - which some rw asshole judges are already doing.

[machoneman]

10. No, they won't make it legal. Instead, they will throw up roadblocks as some universities have...

already like making the accuser face their attacker not in court but in a school run session cloaked as mediation or some other nonsense.

Likewise in real criminal trials in red states, a move is on to also mandate that the victim must face their attacker in open court where, if that's not bad enough, under cross the defense can pry into a victim's sexual history and other highly personal issues like "did you go the the police immediately...did you have any witnesses?"

As in the courtroom drama TV series we've all seen, the defense can also cross-examine witnesses who would go under the glare of public testimony. Nothing like dragging your pals into court and asking them, even if they didn't witness the crime, to undergo intense questioning.

They will do ANYTHING to make it as hard as possible to convict any perpetrator unless they actually kill the victim. I kid you not. Sad.

[magicarpet]

6. White Privilege hidden under the cloak of privacy.

[gordianot]

7. Undoubtedly the crown jewel when you are king of debt and tax fraud.

He already has the shinning jewels of investigation and control of the IRS. Hereditary succession and elimination of elections would round this out.

[dalton99a]

9. Whoring for Big Banks and Fat Cats.