06/06/2011
From the transcript of an interview of Gretchen Morgenson by Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow:JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to get back to this issue of the lowering of lending standards, because one of the–I’d say the first half of the book is really sort of dedicated to how this process unraveled. And you say at one point that when the Boston Fed–I think it was in the '90s, early ’90s–comes up with a report showing that there had in fact been discrimination in the lending industry toward minority groups, that there was–that one of the few publications that raised issues about this report was Forbes magazine. And I think you quote some of the staff members–Peter Brimelow, who I remember in particular–challenging this whole notion that there had been racial discrimination in lending practices. Now, I happen to know a little bit about Brimelow, because later on, a few years later, he wrote a book, Alien Nation, that became widely criticized because the theory was that the United States was being brought down by massive Third World immigration. So I don’t expect that Peter Brimelow would be the kind of person who would, like, stand up against racial discrimination. But the question of the impact–how central was the lowering of standards by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in lending standards? How much was that a part of it? And how much was actual fraud by the industry, by the brokers, by the appraisers, by the Mazilos of the world, who actually engineered fraudulent loans?I suspect Mr. Gonzalez hasn’t actually read The Hidden Clue,by Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer, [Forbes, January 4, 1993]
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