A bank you should do business with – East Bridgewater Savings

March 17, 2009 | Steve McGough | |

If you ran a bank that had zero loan defaults, no foreclosures on the books and none expected, how do you think your institution should be rated? If you’re the FDIC, you issue a needs to improve rating since the bank did not loan out enough money according to standards set by the Community Reinvestment Act.

In other words, this bank is racist since they did not loan money out to borrowers who could not pay it back. Is this not part of the big problem here?

Hat tip to Ed at Hot Air who brings us links to James Pethokoukis’ US News and World Report, Yes, the Community Reinvestment Act Really Did Help Cause the Housing Crisis.

Yet the FDIC has turned up the heat on Petrucelli’s bank [East Bridgewater Savings], giving it an apparently rare “needs to improve rating,” for not making more risky loans under the Community Reinvestment Act. Here is how the FDIC puts it: “There are no apparent financial or legal impediments that would limit the bank’s ability to help meet the credit needs of its assessment area. The FDIC examiners also faulted East Bridgewater “for not advertising and marketing its loan products enough. The bank, which does not have a Web site, offers fixed-rate mortgages.”

Me: How many East Bridgewaters are out there that knuckled under to the pressure and started handing out mortgages to whomever? I am not saying that CRA is the only factor here. There is plenty of blame to go around, regulators, Alan Greenspan, derivatives desks on Wall Street. But to let CRA and its enablers off the hook is ridiculous.

Previous

Posted in

Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

3 Comments

  1. Dimsdale on March 17, 2009 at 7:21 am

    Talk about being too stupid to learn from one's mistakes!  Or maybe they are being "smart" in an attempt to encompass all banks in the latest Democrat socialist nationalization frenzy.

    Just another reason that banking rules, and not contrived racial issues, should dominate in any banking transaction.  It is OUR money, both in the bank, and what will be taken from us to fix these banks when the inevitable occurs.



  2. gillie28 on March 17, 2009 at 8:34 am

    Here's my question: WHo is Dimsdale?  Just asking, that's all.



  3. davis on March 17, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    How did racist get in here?



The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.

You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.

The site is not broken.