* I was in the risk management department of a large bank in the late 2000s. I remember that even in 2009, when we were still barely over the worst of the financial crisis, the feds were pushing us to lower the FICO cutoff on one of our government-backed products (FHA maybe? can’t remember) by 40 points. And the cutoff was already pretty low, mind you. It was jaw-droppingly stupid.
* As the risk manager of a top 10 bank in the 90s, residential mortgages had the lowest risk allocation among all our lending (other than government debt, eg Treasuries).
Talking to someone in my old position circa 2010, residential mortgages had the highest risk allocation among all lending. Part of this is that recovery assumptions went from 90% to 20%, due to new laws designed to help poor borrowers. That gets put into the cost of new loans, it’s not ‘internalized by banks.’
* Yes, and they get lectured about all the money left on the table; they are not making as much coin as they should, so the federal gov’t is going to come in and force them to make more good loans so they will make even more money. It is like there are a bunch of people clamoring to make a mortgage payment, but they are denied that thrill by evil bankers. Where is that money now? Is it accumulating in a savings account? Under the mattress? Burned in the fire place? Rolled up and used as toilet paper? Is the opportunity cost of that money higher as a mortgage vs. current consumption? History tells us no, but I guess that doesn’t matter.
* Capitalism is the greatest enemy of racial discrimination in history. Why so? Because profit-making joint-stock corporations that compete for capital cannot afford to discriminate. Those that do to any significant degree — whether positively or negatively — will either go out of business or be taken over by their competitors.
* First of all, it may be good sense to discriminate, whatever your personal biases or lack of them, if your customers want you to, particularly if your service is ‘politically coded’ in some fashion. I’m sure Southern restaurants in Jim Crow days were able to charge higher prices to whites who wanted to avoid dining with blacks, and whites were happy to pay them. I’ve read on other boards of people who worked to find a job where they didn’t have to work with Jews (and probably had to accept a lower salary or less favorable terms to do so, since they had to look around). Look on the other side–Starbucks no doubt thought it was going to pick up lots of SWPL customers with its silly ‘RaceTogether’ initiative, and companies were jumping on the bandwagon to give domestic-partner benefits even if they didn’t have a lot of gay employees, as long as their customers leaned to the left.
Second, as any HBDer will tell you, the races, etc. are different. You really think black and white employees have the same mean absentee rates, etc. ? (I think Steve dug up an example of a lender who found that Chinese-Americans were *more* likely to repay their loans.) If discrimination is rational, it will even work against law-abiding, hardworking black employees (and I know several), because it’s not worth taking the risk. Even look at women and men–refusing to hire women will save you a lot of money on employees who take time off to get pregnant, etc.
Third, in an ideal market, sure. But usually you have oligopolies after a few decades (look at operating systems, which didn’t even exist 40 years ago), and when you’re big, you can afford to be inefficient. We hear all the time of CEOs, etc. giving important jobs to relatives and personal cronies, rather than doing an extended search for the best person. Sure this hurts the company, but if it’s big enough and there are few enough competitors, it will survive–the head of Coke could hire only his relatives for C-level positions, and Coke might lose ground to Pepsi, but it wouldn’t go out of business.
* I’m really impressed by the industry and adaptability of Hindu immigrants. You see disproportionately so many of them in these types of positions; it is astonishing how quickly they figure out where the juice is in our society and socket themselves right in.
* I don’t understand how its constitutional to force someone to do business where they do not want to. They should have to prove that black borrowers have lower default rates among their borrowers to even start a discrimination suit.
* There have been a recent rash of African American church fires in the vicinity of Ferguson, MO. SJW types nationwide have been rendering their garments at the injustice of it. The first perp has now been collared, implicated in the arson of two of the churches. And whaddya know…..
* Because Rubio has been advocating for more H1bs for years. Not surprising, because Rubio takes lots of money from Silicon Valley oligarchs. Trump, within a few months of announcing his run, put out the toughest immigration platform we’ve seen since the 1950s.
Trump is self-funding, so he can take the positions he desires. He also gone out of the way to oppose the H1b several times (Twitter, Nevada rally, Breitbart interview) in the last few days. He didn’t have to, but he chose to. Most voters don’t even know the H1b exists, so it’s heartening that Trump would make an issue out of the H1b. It shows he’s serious.
* Wisdom is a construct of White Supremacy.
* We can’t have nice things, or convenient things, or Western Civilization, because some people can’t control themselves and we must cater to them.
* Lots of countries are even *more* racist. Particularly non-white countries. Just try being a Korean in Japan. I don’t see the Chinese taking in a million immigrants every time there’s a typhoon in Southeast Asia.
Human beings form into tribes and dislike people not in their tribe. If there’s no racial difference, you still see rival playground cliques and so on. Look at the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry between white Midwesterners!
So, yeah, the USA is racist. So is everyone else. It’s human nature. What is unusual about the USA is the large number of people who seem to succeed in spite of natural human prejudice. This has plusses and minuses, as people here have documented (Jews supporting immigration, Chinese citizenship scams), but the USA is hardly the worst offender when it comes to prejudice.
* They say there was this redlining in the 30s and that prevented blacks from acquiring wealth and this has snowballed down through the generations. But that argument assumes inheritance plays a much bigger role than it does. In reality, most people don’t die with much of an estate, especially when split several ways. It’s a very skewed distribution with the vast majority of people of whatever race getting nothing to modest payouts, and then a right tail of huge inheritances.
The real reason blacks don’t have any wealth is because they don’t save money. There is a lot of data on this. Even controlling for income, blacks tend to have little in savings and most of their “net worth” tied up in consumption goods, i.e., their highly leveraged house and car. I would like to see a study on car value to income ratio by race.
