“I recently came across an astonishing assertion about the Community Reinvestment Act, the legislation tagged by many on the Right as to blame for the financial meltdown. According to what I was reading, the CRA was really a good thing since banks covered by CRA were only one-third as likely as other financial institutions to originate subprime mortgage loans, even though the former were denying loan applications at the significantly lower rate. This might pose a problem for people who want to blame the crisis entirely on CRA, but other than weakening that argument, this claim actually says very little since CRA only applies to (some) banks and savings institutions, not to non-bank financial services companies like the late Countrywide Financial, which were the biggest speculators in the mortgage market.” (03/16/10)