Steve Sailer writes: In complete contrast to, say, Apple Stores, which can be found all over the South Bronx and the ungentrified parts of Brooklyn.
Oh, wait, sorry, no, Apple Stores can’t actually be found in poor neighborhoods in New York. It’s fine for Apple, the richest company in the world with something like $200 billion in unused cash sitting around, to do business where it thinks best, but banks are subject to federal regulatory oversight.
Seriously, the moral theory of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act was that banks that open branches in black neighborhoods to take deposits should also lend in the same neighborhoods. It wasn’t about forcing banks to lend in geographical areas where they don’t do business.
(One unexpected side effect of the CRA was that it hurt small black-owned banks, which traditionally tended to diversify their risks by taking deposits in black neighborhoods and lending in white neighborhoods.)
