"Chi, who was twenty-four and worked in customer service at a pharmaceutical company, ... Chen, her husband, who was a year younger... Chen worked at a hair salon. They’d been living in Chen’s studio apartment, not far away, but Chi was now pregnant with their first child and they needed a bigger place.
The plan was to buy a two-family house and rent out one of the units. Looking around the neighborhood, they found one with a small garden out front. The asking price was seven hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and they began putting together a down payment with money from savings and relatives."
“To be honest, we didn’t think we were really breaking rules so much as circumventing them—you know, in a Chinese way.”
...
“I thought the D.A.’s office might address the bigger, systemic problem of tax evasion in Chinatown and admonish the population about the importance of following the law,”
...
He was also scornful of Vance’s idea that Abacus had put its borrowers at risk. “They don’t need protection, because they are the biggest beneficiaries and perpetrators in the entire case. Some of these people earn half a million or more and still get to be on welfare and Medicaid.”
Date: October 13th, 2015 2:58 PM Author: Turquoise Trailer Park
“To be honest, we didn’t think we were really breaking rules so much as circumventing them—you know, in a Chinese way.”
...
“I thought the D.A.’s office might address the bigger, systemic problem of tax evasion in Chinatown and admonish the population about the importance of following the law,”
...
He was also scornful of Vance’s idea that Abacus had put its borrowers at risk. “They don’t need protection, because they are the biggest beneficiaries and perpetrators in the entire case. Some of these people earn half a million or more and still get to be on welfare and Medicaid.”
i wish our political discourse were serious enough to have a more fundamental debate over data aggregation by private companies, and whether it should even be legal on an equifax-scale.
it's not legal in germany, for example. if you started compiling dossiers like that on private german citizens, you'd face five years in jail.
but instead, we're not a mature nation, and everything has to be dumbed down into divisive racial terms.
Date: October 13th, 2015 4:09 PM Author: coral electric cruise ship becky
Removing objective scoring would hurt minorities who manage their credit well. With no scoring available, bankers would look to soft factors like appearance, who your father is, where you went to school, job prestige. No way they're lending to Darnell the bus driver even if he pays rent and doesn't owe $2k to rent a center.
Also this would kill competition in the financial sector. Banks with lots of customers would have proprietary information to build internal metrics and it would benefit them to consolidate all a customer's business lines like insurance and retirement accounts to get a better look into their situation. Small banks could never break in.
I don't think FICO does, they just know debt to available credit.
I think the article is pointing out how hard it is for minorities to get ahead and we're supposed to feel sorry for them. Unfortunately, for normal people reading this, it's like a no brainer that they need to budget for things like medical, dental and health before you had them a check for 100s of thousands of dollars and risk and more debt that isn't as important as basic needs like healthcare.
Date: October 13th, 2015 3:07 PM Author: mustard tripping stead
"For decades, banks have systematically redlined black and Latino neighborhoods, refusing to make conventional loans or locate branches in non-white and lower-income areas,"
It's almost like banks don't want to build branches in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods....
Date: October 13th, 2015 3:07 PM Author: well-lubricated mind-boggling meetinghouse
Credit reports and scores are not race neutral. Rather, they embed existing racial inequities in our credit system and economy – to the point that a person’s credit information serves as a proxy for race.
Those teaser-rate and op-ARM mortgages were pretty predatory, but shitlibs have trouble understanding who the real victims of the predation were (hint: not the dumn poors).
During the height of the Great Housing Bubble, many shitmortgages were packaged into mortgage-backed securities, which were rated AAA prime super-safe investments, and then sold to pension funds, etc. This created an unusual incentive to get dumb poors to lie on loan applications so they could sign more mortgages to sell to MBS to sell to pension funds. You could call these "predatory loans"