High-cost lenders are targeting these communities, preventing them from building wealth to pass on to their children.
Why are blacks and Hispanics targeted with these risk financial products? Perhaps these differences stem not from the borrowers’ race but from their worse financial circumstances, a reason some would say justifies the higher rates. Not the case, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which finds that race and ethnicity matter substantially on their own.
.. According to them, even after controlling for general risk considerations, such as credit score, loan-to-value ratio, subordinate liens, and debt-to-income ratios, Hispanic Americans are 78 percent more likely to be given a high-cost mortgage, and black Americans are 105 percent more likely.
.. Why are African American and Hispanic borrowers ending up at the lenders who will charge them the most? High-cost lenders are much more aggressive in minority markets, the researchers say, which increases such borrowers’ exposure to these pricier loans.
.. Prior research has found that members of these minority groups are less likely to comparison shop for mortgage products, which in turn increases the chances that they’ll wind up with the first offer they receive, and those offers tend to be expensive ones.
.. Among their recommendations for decreasing the racial inequities in the mortgage lending market, the researchers suggest focusing on the way lenders do business, specifically ending the division of major lenders’ subsidiaries into “prime” and “subprime” entities, which can unfairly channel minorities into riskier, more expensive loans for no good reason.
TRUMPAGEDDON!
Trump is a creature of today’s political and cultural establishment. How could a master of comic mockery like Stephen Colbert object to Trump’s political style?
.. In 2013 one of the winners of the Bradley Prize was Fox News founder Roger Ailes, perhaps the single most influential person behind the transformation of politics into entertainment over the last generation. Very Trumpian.
.. The National Review symposium I contributed to also featured Glenn Beck. If he’s acceptable to the conservative establishment, is Trump a stretch?
.. For a long time, he says, the Right has promoted “a toxic politics of fear and resentment, sometimes brewed with a tinge of racial animosity.”
.. The implication is that the American people have been hoodwinked by a professional political class that’s not up to the job and lies about it. Perhaps we should say, “Shame on you, Mr. Voter, you shouldn’t let yourself be taken in like that.” Kristof implies something different. His line of reasoning implies that many Republic voters are wicked. After all, why would those cynical Republican Party grandees cook up their toxic politics? It can only work if the Republican base is actually motivated by fear, resentment, and racial animus.
.. I can’t think of any Democrat of standing, in public life or not, who wouldn’t be thrilled to have Bill grace their cocktail receptions or dinner parties. Why, then, should Donald Trump be held accountable for his many excesses?
.. Donald Trump should be no surprise. He’s made in their image.
Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.
Data from Public Policy Polling show that a third of Mr. Trump’s backers in South Carolina support barring gays and lesbians from entering the country. This is nearly twice the support for this idea (17 percent) among Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s voters and nearly five times the support of John Kasich’s and Ben Carson’s supporters (7 percent).
.. The P.P.P. poll asked voters if they thought whites were a superior race. Most Republican primary voters in South Carolina — 78 percent — disagreed with this idea (10 percent agreed and 11 percent weren’t sure). But among Mr. Trump’s supporters, only 69 percent disagreed. Mr. Carson’s voters were the most opposed to the notion (99 percent), followed by Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz’s supporters at 92 and 89 percent. Mr. Rubio’s backers were close to the average level of disagreement (76 percent).
.. According to P.P.P., 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters in South Carolina wish the Confederate battle flag were still flying on their statehouse grounds. (It was removed last summer less than a month after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.) The polling firm says that 38 percent of them wish the South had won the Civil War. Only a quarter of Mr. Rubio’s supporters share that wish, and even fewer of Mr. Kasich’s and Mr. Carson’s do.
.. Nationally, further analyses of the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view
.. Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.
Liberal, Harsh Denmark
And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of 5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation. Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost its entire Jewish population.
When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable.
.. The new law, which passed with support from the Social Democrats as well as the Danish People’s Party, permits police to strip-search asylum-seekers and confiscate their cash and most valuables above 10,000 Danish kroner ($1,460) to pay for their accommodation
.. In part, the Danish approach has been driven by the country’s long experience with terrorism and jihadism. Nearly a decade before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015, and the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris in November, the publication of the so-called Muhammad cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had already turned Denmark into a primary target for extremists.
.. Though Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the population, there is growing evidence that many of the new arrivals fail to enter the workforce, are slow to learn Danish, and end up in high-crime immigrant neighborhoods where, while relying on extensive state handouts, they and their children are cut off from Danish society.
.. With its unique combination of comprehensive welfare and a flexible labor market—known as flexicurity—Denmark has an efficient economy in which the rate of job turnover is one of the highest in Europe, yet almost 75 percent of working-age Danes are employed.
.. in 1997, a study of racism in EU countries found Danes to be simultaneously among the most tolerant and also the most racist of any European population
.. What made the Danish People’s Party particularly potent, however, was its robust defense of wealth redistribution and advanced welfare benefits for all Danes. “On a traditional left-right scheme they are very difficult to locate,” former prime minister Fogh Rasmussen told me in Copenhagen. “They are tough on crime, tough on immigration, but on welfare policy, they are center left. Sometimes they even try to surpass the Social Democrats.”