On Nov 6, 3:53 pm, wrote:
^DJA Dow Jones Composite DOWN 4.82%
^DJI Dow Jones Industrial DOWN 4.85%
^DJT Dow Jones Transportation DOWN 5.13%
^DJU Dow Jones Utility DOWN 4.25%

^IXIC NASDAQ DOWN 4.34%

^GSPC S&P 500 DOWN 5.03%

Kiss your 401K good bye!

Yes you can. And then send a thank you note to George Bush, DICKhead
Cheney and the criminals in Congress (GOP and DemoRATS) and all the
civil "servants" in the government bureaucracy who were being paid to
protect the public from such criminal looting.

On Nov 6, 4:41*pm, wrote:
On Nov 6, 3:53 pm, wrote:

^DJA Dow Jones Composite * * *DOWN 4.82%
^DJI Dow Jones Industrial * * * * *DOWN 4.85%
^DJT Dow Jones Transportation *DOWN 5.13%
^DJU Dow Jones Utility * * * * * * *DOWN 4.25%

^IXIC NASDAQ * * * * * * * * * * * * *DOWN 4.34%

^GSPC S&P 500 * * * * * * * * * * * DOWN 5.03%

Kiss your 401K good bye!

Yes you can. And then send a thank you note to George Bush, DICKhead
Cheney and the criminals in Congress (GOP and DemoRATS) and all the
civil "servants" in the government bureaucracy who were being paid to
protect the public from such criminal looting.

Your Liberal Fascist Neo-Communist Propaganda Lies have all been
exposed and debunked!

The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities

The Community Reinvestment Act funnels billions to left-wing
activists, while threatening to destabilize lower-middle-class
neighborhoods.

Winter 2000

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act,
a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one
of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate
Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast
extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions,
U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-
income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it
funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups,
intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the
financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government,
rather than their own striving, is the key to their well-being.

The CRA's premise sounds unassailable: helping the poor buy and keep
homes will stabilize and rebuild city neighborhoods. As enforced
today, though, the law portends just the opposite, threatening to
undermine the efforts of the upwardly mobile poor by saddling them
with neighbors more than usually likely to depress property values by
not maintaining their homes adequately or by losing them to
foreclosure. The CRA's logic also helps to ensure that inner-city
neighborhoods stay poor by discouraging the kinds of investment that
might make them better off.

The Act, which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977, grew out of the complaint
that urban banks were "redlining" inner-city neighborhoods, refusing
to lend to their residents while using their deposits to finance
suburban expansion. CRA decreed that banks have "an affirmative
obligation" to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they
are chartered, and that federal banking regulators should assess how
well they do that when considering their requests to merge or to open
branches. Implicit in the bill's rationale was a belief that CRA was
needed to counter racial discrimination in lending, an assumption that
later seemed to gain support from a widely publicized 1990 Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston finding that blacks and Hispanics suffered
higher mortgage-denial rates than whites, even at similar income
levels.

In addition, the Act's backers claimed, CRA would be profitable for
banks. They just needed a push from the law to learn how to identify
profitable inner-city lending opportunities. Going one step further,
the Treasury Department recently asserted that banks that do figure
out ways to reach inner-city borrowers might not be able to stop
competitors from using similar methods—and therefore would not
undertake such marketing in the first place without a push from
Washington.

None of these justifications holds up, however, because of the changes
that reshaped America's banking industry in the 1990s. Banking in the
1970s, when CRA was passed, was a highly regulated industry in which
small, local savings banks, rather than commercial banks, provided
most home mortgages. Regulation prohibited savings banks from
branching across state lines and sometimes even limited branching
within states, inhibiting competition, the most powerful defense
against discrimination. With such regulatory protection, savings banks
could make a comfortable profit without doing the hard work of finding
out which inner-city neighborhoods and borrowers were good risks and
which were not. Savings banks also had reason to worry that if they
charged inner-city borrowers a higher rate of interest to balance the
additional risk of such lending, they might jeopardize the protection
from competition they enjoyed. Thanks to these artificially created
conditions, some redlining of creditworthy borrowers doubtless
occurred.

The insular world of the savings banks collapsed in the early
nineties, however, the moment it was exposed to competition. Banking
today is a far more wide-open industry, with banks offering mortgages
through the Internet, where they compete hotly with aggressive online
mortgage companies. Standardized, computer-based scoring systems now
rate the creditworthiness of applicants, and the giant, government-
chartered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have helped create huge pools of
credit by purchasing mortgage loans and packaging large numbers of
them together into securities for sale to bond buyers. With such
intense competition for profits and so much money available to lend,
it's hard to imagine that banks couldn't instantly figure out how to
market to minorities or would resist such efforts for fear of
inspiring imitators. Nor has the race discrimination argument for CRA
held up. A September 1999 study by Freddie Mac, for instance,
confirmed what previous Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation studies had found: that African-Americans have
disproportionate levels of credit problems, which explains why they
have a harder time qualifying for mortgage money. As Freddie Mac
found, blacks with incomes of $65,000 to $75,000 a year have on
average worse credit records than whites making under $25,000.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas had it right when it said—in a
paper pointedly entitled "Red Lining or Red Herring?"—"the CRA may not
be needed in today's financial environment to ensure all segments of
our economy enjoy access to credit." True, some households—those with
a history of credit problems, for instance, or those buying homes in
neighborhoods where re-selling them might be difficult—may not qualify
for loans at all, and some may have to pay higher interest rates, in
reflection of higher risk. But higher rates in such situations are
balanced by lower house prices. This is not a conspiracy against the
poor; it's how markets measure risk and work to make credit available.

Nevertheless, until recently, the CRA didn't matter all that much.
During the seventies and eighties, CRA enforcement was perfunctory.
Regulators asked banks to demonstrate that they were trying to reach
their entire "assessment area" by advertising in minority-oriented
newspapers or by sending their executives to serve on the boards of
local community groups. The Clinton administration changed this state
of affairs dramatically. Ignoring the sweeping transformation of the
banking industry since the CRA was passed, the Clinton Treasury
Department's 1995 regulations made getting a satisfactory CRA rating
much harder. The new regulations de-emphasized subjective assessment
measures in favor of strictly numerical ones. Bank examiners would use
federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group, and
race, to rate banks on performance. There would be no more A's for
effort. Only results—specific loans, specific levels of service—would
count. Where and to whom have home loans been made? Have banks
invested in all neighborhoods within their assessment area? Do they
operate branches in those neighborhoods?

Crucially, the new CRA regulations also instructed bank examiners to
take into account how well banks responded to complaints. The old CRA
evaluation process had allowed advocacy groups a chance to express
their views on individual banks, and publicly available data on the
lending patterns of individual banks allowed activist groups to target
institutions considered vulnerable to protest. But for advocacy groups
that were in the complaint business, the Clinton administration
regulations offered a formal invitation. The National Community
Reinvestment Coalition—a foundation-funded umbrella group for
community activist groups that profit from the CRA—issued a clarion
call to its members in a leaflet entitled "The New CRA Regulations:
How Community Groups Can Get Involved." "Timely comments," the NCRC
observed with a certain understatement, "can have a strong influence
on a bank's CRA rating."

The Clinton administration's get-tough regulatory regime mattered so
crucially because bank deregulation had set off a wave of mega-
mergers, including the acquisition of the Bank of America by
NationsBank, BankBoston by Fleet Financial, and Bankers Trust by
Deutsche Bank. Regulatory approval of such mergers depended, in part,
on positive CRA ratings. "To avoid the possibility of a denied or
delayed application," advises the NCRC in its deadpan tone, "lending
institutions have an incentive to make formal agreements with
community organizations." By intervening—even just threatening to
intervene—in the CRA review process, left-wing nonprofit groups have
been able to gain control over eye-popping pools of bank capital,
which they in turn parcel out to individual low-income mortgage
seekers. A radical group called ACORN Housing has a $760 million
commitment from the Bank of New York; the Boston-based Neighborhood
Assistance Corporation of America has a $3-billion agreement with the
Bank of America; a coalition of groups headed by New Jersey Citizen
Action has a five-year, $13-billion agreement with First Union
Corporation. Similar deals operate in almost every major U.S. city.
Observes Tom Callahan, executive director of the Massachusetts
Affordable Housing Alliance, which has $220 million in bank mortgage
money to parcel out, "CRA is the backbone of everything we do."

In addition to providing the nonprofits with mortgage money to
disburse, CRA allows those organizations to collect a fee from the
banks for their services in marketing the loans. The Senate Banking
Committee has estimated that, as a result of CRA, $9.5 billion so far
has gone to pay for services and salaries of the nonprofit groups
involved. To deal with such groups and to produce CRA compliance data
for regulators, banks routinely establish separate CRA departments. A
CRA consultant industry has sprung up to assist them. New financial-
services firms offer to help banks that think they have a CRA problem
make quick "investments" in packaged portfolios of CRA loans to get
into compliance.

The result of all this activity, argues the CEO of one midsize bank,
is that "banks are promising to make loans they would have made
anyway, with some extra aggressiveness on risky mortgages thrown in."
Many bankers—and even some CRA advocates—share his view. As one Fed
economist puts it, the assertion that CRA was needed to force banks to
see profitable lending opportunities is "like saying you need the
rooster to tell the sun to come up. It was going to happen anyway."
And indeed, a survey of the lending policies of Chicago-area mortgage
companies by a CRA-connected community group, the Woodstock Institute,
found "a tendency to lend in a wide variety of neighborhoods"—even
though the CRA doesn't apply to such lenders.

If loans that win banks good CRA ratings were going to be made anyway,
and if most of those loans are profitable, should CRA, even if
redundant, bother anyone? Yes: because the CRA funnels billions of
investment dollars through groups that understand protest and
political advocacy but not marketing or finance. This amateur delivery
system for investment capital already shows signs that it may be going
about its business unwisely. And a quiet change in CRA's mission—so
that it no longer directs credit only to specific places, as Congress
mandated, but also to low- and moderate-income home buyers, wherever
they buy their property—greatly extends the area where these groups
can cause damage.

There is no more important player in the CRA-inspired mortgage
industry than the Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of
America. Chief executive Bruce Marks has set out to become the Wal-
Mart of home mortgages for lower-income households. Using churches and
radio advertising to reach borrowers, he has made NACA a brand name
nationwide, with offices in 21 states, and he plans to double that
number within a year. With "delegated underwriting authority" from the
banks, NACA itself—not the banks—determines whether a mortgage
applicant is qualified, and it closes sales right in its own offices.
It expects to close 5,000 mortgages next year, earning a $2,000
origination fee on each. Its annual budget exceeds $10 million.

Marks, a Scarsdale native, NYU MBA, and former Federal Reserve
employee, unabashedly calls himself a "bank terrorist"—his public
relations spokesman laughingly refers to him as "the shark, the
predator," and the NACA newspaper is named the Avenger. They're not
kidding: bankers so fear the tactically brilliant Marks for his
ability to disrupt annual meetings and even target bank executives'
homes that they often call him to make deals before they announce any
plans that will put them in CRA's crosshairs. A $3 billion loan
commitment by Nationsbank, for instance, well in advance of its
announced merger with Bank of America, "was a preventive strike," says
one NACA spokesman.

Marks is unhesitatingly candid about his intent to use NACA to promote
an activist, left-wing political agenda. NACA loan applicants must
attend a workshop that celebrates—to the accompaniment of gospel music—
the protests that have helped the group win its bank lending
agreements. If applicants do buy a home through NACA, they must pledge
to assist the organization in five "actions" annually—anything from
making phone calls to full-scale "mobilizations" against target banks,
"mau-mauing" them, as sixties' radicals used to call it. "NACA
believes in aggressive grassroots advocacy," says its Homebuyer's
Workbook.

The NACA policy agenda embraces the whole universe of financial
institutions. It advocates tough federal usury laws, restrictions on
the information that banks can provide to credit-rating services,
financial sanctions against banks with poor CRA ratings even if
they're not about to merge or branch, and the extension of CRA
requirements to insurance companies and other financial institutions.
But Marks's political agenda reaches far beyond finance. He wants, he
says, to do whatever he can to ensure that "working people have good
jobs at good wages." The home mortgage business is his tool for
political organizing: the Homebuyer's Workbook contains a voter
registration application and states that "NACA's mission of
neighborhood stabilization is based on participation in the political
process. To participate you must register to vote." Marks plans to
install a high-capacity phone system that can forward hundreds of
calls to congressional offices—"or Phil Gramm's house"—to buttress
NACA campaigns. The combination of an army of "volunteers" and a voter
registration drive portends (though there is no evidence of this so
far) that someday CRA-related funds and Marks's troop of CRA borrowers
might end up fueling a host of Democratic candidacies. During the
Reagan years, the Right used to talk of cutting off the flow of
federal funds to left-liberal groups, a goal called "defunding the
Left"; through the CRA, the Clinton administration has found a highly
effective way of doing exactly the opposite, funneling millions to
NACA or to outfits like ACORN, which advocates a nationalized health-
care system, "people before profits at the utilities," and a tax code
based "solely on the ability to pay."

Whatever his long-term political goals, Marks may well reshape urban
and suburban neighborhoods because of the terms on which NACA
qualifies prospective home buyers. While most CRA-supported borrowers
would doubtless find loans in today's competitive mortgage industry, a
small percentage would not, and NACA welcomes such buyers with open
arms. "Our job," says Marks, "is to push the envelope." Accordingly,
he gladly lends to people with less than $3,000 in savings, or with
checkered credit histories or significant debt. Many of his borrowers
are single-parent heads of household. Such borrowers are, Marks
believes, fundamentally oppressed and at permanent disadvantage, and
therefore society must adjust its rules for them. Hence, NACA's most
crucial policy decision: it requires no down payments whatsoever from
its borrowers. A down-payment requirement, based on concern as to
whether a borrower can make payments, is—when applied to low-income
minority buyers—"patronizing and almost racist," Marks says.

This policy—"America's best mortgage program for working people," NACA
calls it—is an experiment with extraordinarily high risks. There is no
surer way to destabilize a neighborhood than for its new generation of
home buyers to lack the means to pay their mortgages—which is likely
to be the case for a significant percentage of those granted a no-down-
payment mortgage based on their low-income classification rather than
their good credit history. Even if such buyers do not lose their
homes, they are a group more likely to defer maintenance on their
properties, creating the problems that lead to streets going bad and
neighborhoods going downhill. Stable or increasing property values
grow out of the efforts of many; one unpainted house, one sagging
porch, one abandoned property is a threat to the work of dozens,
because such signs of neglect discourage prospective buyers.

A no-down-payment policy reflects a belief that poor families should
qualify for home ownership because they are poor, in contrast to the
reality that some poor families are prepared to make the sacrifices
necessary to own property, and some are not. Keeping their distance
from those unable to save money is a crucial means by which upwardly
mobile, self-sacrificing people establish and maintain the value of
the homes they buy. If we empower those with bad habits, or those who
have made bad decisions, to follow those with good habits to better
neighborhoods—thanks to CRA's new emphasis on lending to low-income
borrowers no matter where they buy their homes—those neighborhoods
will not remain better for long.

Because many of the activists' big-money deals with the banks are so
new, no one knows for sure exactly which neighborhoods the community
groups are flooding with CRA-related mortgages and what effect they
are having on those neighborhoods. But some suggestive early returns
are available from Massachusetts, where CRA-related advocacy has
flourished for more than a decade. A study for a consortium of banks
and community groups found that during the 1990s home purchases
financed by nonprofit lenders have overwhelmingly not been in the
inner-city areas where redlining had been suspected. Instead, 41
percent of all the loans went to the lower-middle-class neighborhoods
of Hyde Park, Roslindale, and Dorchester Center/Codman Square—Boston's
equivalent of New York's borough of Queens—and additional loans went
to borrowers moving to the suburbs. In other words, CRA lending
appears to be helping borrowers move out of inner-city neighborhoods
into better-off areas. Similarly, not-yet-published data from the
state-funded Massachusetts Housing Partnership show that many new
Dorchester Center, Roslindale, and Hyde Park home buyers came from
much poorer parts of the city, such as the Roxbury ghetto. Florence
Higgins, a home-ownership counsellor for the Massachusetts Affordable
Housing Alliance, confirms the trend, noting that many buyers she
counsels lived in subsidized rental apartments prior to buying their
homes.

This CRA-facilitated migration makes the mortgage terms of groups like
NACA particularly troubling. In a September 1999 story, the Wall
Street Journal reported, based on a review of court documents by
Boston real estate analyst John Anderson, that the Fleet Bank
initiated foreclosure proceedings against 4 percent of loans made for
Fleet by NACA in 1994 and 1995—a rate four times the industry average.
Overextended buyers don't always get much help from their nonprofit
intermediaries, either: Boston radio station WBUR reported in July
that home buyers in danger of losing their homes had trouble getting
their phone calls returned by the ACORN Housing group.

NACA frankly admits that it is willing to run these risks. It
emphasizes the virtues of the counselling programs it offers (like all
CRA groups) to prepare its typical buyer—"a hotel worker with an
income of $25K and probably some past credit problems," says a NACA
spokesman—and it operates what it calls a "neighborhood stabilization
fund" on which buyers who fall behind on payments can draw. But Bruce
Marks says that he would consider a low foreclosure rate to be a
problem. "If we had a foreclosure rate of 1 percent, that would just
prove we were skimming," he says. Accordingly, in mid-1999, 8.2
percent of the mortgages NACA had arranged with the Fleet Bank were
delinquent, compared with the national average of 1.9 percent.
"Considering our clientele," Marks asserts, "nine out of ten would
have to be considered a success."

The no-down-payment policy has sparked so sharp a division within the
CRA industry that the National Community Reinvestment Coalition has
expelled Bruce Marks and NACA from its ranks over it. The
precipitating incident: when James Johnson, then CEO of Fannie Mae,
made a speech to NCRC members on the importance of down payments to
keep mortgage-backed securities easily salable, NACA troops, in
keeping with the group's style of personalizing disputes, distributed
pictures of Johnson, captioned: "I make $6 million a year, and I can
afford a down payment. Why can't you?" Says Josh Silver, research
director of NCRC: "There is no quicker way to undermine CRA than
through bad loans." NCRC represents hundreds of smallish community
groups, many of which do insist on down payments—and many of which
make loans in the same neighborhoods as NACA and understand the risk
its philosophy poses. Still, whenever NACA opens a new branch office,
it will be difficult for the nonprofits already operating in that area
to avoid matching its come-one, come-all terms.

Even without a no-down-payment policy, the pressure on banks to make
CRA-related loans may be leading to foreclosures. Though bankers
generally cheerlead for CRA out of fear of being branded racists if
they do not, the CEO of one midsize bank grumbles that 20 percent of
his institution's CRA-related mortgages, which required only $500 down
payments, were delinquent in their very first year, and probably 7
percent will end in foreclosure. "The problem with CRA," says an
executive with a major national financial-services firm, "is that
banks will simply throw money at things because they want that CRA
rating." From the banks' point of view, CRA lending is simply a price
of doing business—even if some of the mortgages must be written off.
The growth in very large banks—ones most likely to sign major CRA
agreements—also means that those advancing the funds for CRA loans are
less likely to have to worry about the effects of those loans going
bad: such loans will be a small portion of their lending portfolios.

Looking into the future gives further cause for concern: "The bulk of
these loans," notes a Federal Reserve economist, "have been made
during a period in which we have not experienced an economic
downturn." The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America's own
success stories make you wonder how much CRA-related carnage will
result when the economy cools. The group likes to promote, for
instance, the story of Renea Swain-Price, grateful for NACA's
negotiating on her behalf with Fleet Bank to prevent foreclosure when
she fell behind on a $1,400 monthly mortgage payment on her three-
family house in Dorchester. Yet NACA had no qualms about arranging the
$137,500 mortgage in the first place, notwithstanding the fact that
Swain-Price's husband was in prison, that she'd had previous credit
problems, and that the monthly mortgage payment constituted more than
half her monthly salary. The fact that NACA has arranged an agreement
to forestall foreclosure does not inspire confidence that she will
have the resources required to maintain her aging frame house: her new
monthly payment, in recognition of previously missed payments, is
$1,879.

Even if all the CRA-related loans marketed by nonprofits were to turn
out fine, the CRA system is still troubling. Like affirmative action,
it robs the creditworthy of the certain knowledge that they have
qualified by dint of their own effort for a first home mortgage, a
milestone in any family's life. At the same time, it sends the message
that this most important milestone has been provided through the
beneficence of government, devaluing individual accomplishment.
Perhaps the Clinton White House sees this as a costless way to use the
banking system to create a new crop of passionate Democratic
loyalists, convinced that CRA has delivered them from an uncaring
Mammon—when, in all likelihood, banks would have been eager to have
most of them as customers, regulation or no.

CRA also serves to enforce misguided views about how cities should
develop, or redevelop. Consider the "investment" criterion—the loans
to commercial borrowers rather than individual home buyers—that
constitutes 25 percent of the record on which banks are judged in
their compliance review. The Comptroller of the Currency's office
makes clear that it is not interested in just any sort of investment
in so-called underserved neighborhoods. Investment in a new apartment
building or shopping center might not count, if it would help change a
poor neighborhood into a more prosperous one, or if it is not directly
aimed at serving those of low income. Regulators want banks to invest
in housing developments built through nonprofit community development
corporations. Banks not only receive CRA credit for such "investment"—
which they can make anywhere in the country, not just in their backyard
—but they also receive corporate tax credits for it, through the Low
Income Housing Tax Credit. Banks have little incentive to make sure
such projects are well managed, since they get their tax credits and
CRA credits up front.

This investment policy misunderstands what is good for cities and for
the poor. Cities that are alive are cities in flux, with neighborhoods
rising and falling, as tastes and economies change. This ceaseless
flux is a process, as Jane Jacobs brilliantly described it in The
Economy of Cities, that fuels investment, creates jobs, and sparks
innovative adaptation of older buildings to new purposes. Those of
modest means benefit both from the new jobs and from being able to
rent or purchase homes in once-expensive neighborhoods that take on
new roles. The idea that it is necessary to flash-freeze certain
neighborhoods and set them aside for the poor threatens to disrupt
urban vitality and the renewal that comes from the individual plans
and efforts of a city's people.

But keeping these neighborhoods forever poor is the CRA vision. CRA
will help virtually any lower-income family that can come close to
affording a mortgage payment to purchase a home, often in a non-poor
neighborhood. Thanks to CRA-driven bank investment, poor neighborhoods
would then fill up with subsidized rental complexes, presumably for
those poor families who can't earn enough even to get a subsidized,
easy credit mortgage. The effects of all this could be to undermine
lower-middle-class neighborhoods by introducing families not prepared
for home ownership into them and to leave behind poor neighborhoods in
which low-income apartments, filled with the worst-off and least
competent, stand alone—hardly a recipe for renewal.

It will take a Republican president to change or abolish CRA, so
firmly wedded to it is the Clinton administration and so powerfully
does it serve Democratic Party interests. When Senator Gramm attacked
the CRA for its role in funding advocacy groups and for the burden it
imposes on banks, the Clinton administration fought back furiously,
willing to let the crucial Financial Services Modernization Act, to
which Gramm had attached his CRA changes, die, unless Gramm dropped
demands that, for instance, CRA reviews become less frequent. In the
end, Gramm, despite his key position as the chairman of the Senate
Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (even the committee's
name reflects a CRA consciousness) and his willingness to hold repeal
of the Glass-Steagal Act hostage to CRA reform, could only manage to
require community groups to make public their agreements with banks,
disclosing the size of their loan commitments and fees.

A new president should push for outright abolition of the CRA. Failing
that, he could simply instruct the Treasury to roll back the
compliance criteria to their more relaxed, pre-Clintonian level. But
to make the case for repeal—and ensure that some future Democratic
president couldn't simply reimpose Clinton's rules—he might test the
basic premise of the Community Reinvestment Act: that the banking
industry serves the rich, not the poor. He could carry out a
controlled experiment requiring no CRA lending in six Federal Reserve
districts, while CRA remains in force in six others. A comparison of
lending records would show whether there is any real case for CRA. In
addition, CRA regulators should require nonprofit groups with large
CRA-related loan commitments to track and report foreclosure and
delinquency rates. For it is these that will reflect the true threat
that CRA poses, a threat to the health of cities.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_...on_dollar.html
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2...-to-blame.html
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArti...06370789279709
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/541234
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/T...upt_exploiters
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/T...oiters_part_ii
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Economy/wm1906.cfm
http://www.demographia.com/db-overhang.pdf

Kiss your 401K good bye!

Yes you can. And then send a thank you note to George Bush, DICKhead
Cheney and the criminals in Congress (GOP and DemoRATS) and all the
civil "servants" in the government bureaucracy who were being paid to
protect the public from such criminal looting.