Sub-Prime Stagecoach

This article on the Wells Fargo bank, the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, and the ugly pervasiveness of racial discrimination read like an expose written decades ago.  Like in the 1950's, before the Civil Rights movement, before Kennedy, before a man walked on the moon. 

Yet the vehicle of prejudice was distinctly modern.  Wells Fargo loan officials are accused of systematically pushing mortgage loan applicants who were black into the sub-prime category, even if they qualified for less costly loans.  

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

This, of course, made blacks much more vulnerable to mortgage default after the crash of home values.

The bank proffered bonuses in front of the loan officers for selling these sub-prime mortgages.   It is little wonder that they steered people into them - they even targeted the Baltimore area black churches for more customers of these poison pies.

Perhaps some of these loan officers were not outright racists.  Perhaps some of them thought they were just following a win-win policy, making their bonuses and giving people their mortgages.  

Perhaps the bank management didn't intend to setup a racist practice when they instituted the bonus policy.

Perhaps some of these people even voted for Obama.