OK, fair point, the NYPost is not the gold standard in economic analysis.
On the other hand
1. The author, Stan Liebowitz, is "the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas"---not exactly unqualified to speak on the subject.
2. The New York Post may run a lot of salacious pieces, but how often does the NYPost run an overtly discriminatory and salacious piece?
Remember, this is the paper your New York workers read on the train on the way to work. That's about as mixed a bag as you can get. The New York Post, like every other New York paper, does its damnedest to appeal to the widest possible spectrum. The Post is a liberal paper. You can call it conservative, but only when you're comparing it to the NY Times. This makes the article interesting, and it should at least give you pause.
It's easy to take a snotty attitude against reading something like the Post, but the article, which admittedly isn't that great, raises an interesting point. In America we purposefully overlook a lot of things in the name of equality. In underwriting you don't want overlook anything.
The financial analysts who failed to analyze this situation are responsible for the crisis. So are the former home owners who defaulted on their loans. And the people who issued them those loans. But when good analysis is restricted by federal law, and bad analysis is incentivized, how much blame can you place on analysts before next placing it on legislation? Regardless of how much blame you assign to the legislation, you must now multiply that manyfold. This is a little thing that has made a big difference.
The point is that we have to ask ourselves what level of abstraction we are willing to force onto the notion of a person. Are we willing to turn so much of a blind eye that it throws us into economic recession?
This recession is likely to be mild, but deep recessions are a time of great uncertainty. You don't have to read very far back in history to learn that people tend to stop overlooking things when their pocketbooks are empty. Equality, in other words, is a luxury item, and like many of the things we enjoy in America, it's contingent on our economy not exploding.
> The New York Post, like every other New York paper, does its damnedest to appeal to the widest possible spectrum. The Post is a liberal paper.
No it's not. It's owned by Rupert Murdoch (also the owner of Fox News), and it's considered a conservative paper. The Daily News is a more liberal paper. Wikipedia confirms this, though I'm sure you could look for more definitive sources if you want to surf around.
Frankly, I would fully expect the Post to try to scapegoat liberal activist groups.
> The author, Stan Liebowitz, is "the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas"---not exactly unqualified to speak on the subject.
The author is certainly qualified. On the other hand, it's apparent from reading his piece that (rightly or wrongly), he's had this axe to grind about redlining that has left him out of the mainstream consensus for quite a long time. It could be that this makes him uniquely qualified to make an assessment that no one else needs to hear, or it could mean that he's a kook that no one with any sense listens to.
Personally, I'm certainly not qualified to say that the article is wrong, because it may be 100% correct. However, I would like to see more evidence than the word of a guy who's been arguing a minority position for 15+ years in a newspaper that is not known for its commitment to balance.
We would classify the the Village Voice as a very liberal paper, but send it to someone in Nebraska and they'll tell you it's pornography.
Political ideals may draw on universal principles, but the line of scrimmage is different in every district. Murdoch is a businessman first, and he likes to own news companies. He happens to prefer to play one side of the line of scrimmage. The combination means his mouthpieces say different things in different areas. In some areas they endorse Hillary Clinton for re-election to the senate...
I tried to sidestep this criticism, but I was wrong to even sound the terms. The point is that the NYPost doesn't usually run articles like this---otherwise I wouldn't have read it. This tidbit is so salacious it even got my attention.
>He happens to prefer to play one side of the line of scrimmage.
Or at least prefers to play on the side he feels is an underserved market.
Most people want a news source that agrees with them. If a fact doesn't support your views, it must be a lie, right?
In the TV news market, this means that left wing types are split between CNN, CBS, NBC, etc. Murdoch figured this out, and right wing types all watch Fox.
If you're going to impeach what you believe to a a secondary source of questionable veracity, it might behoove you to use something other than baldfaced assertions yourself.
Well, for starters, the author's baseline claim that there was no factual basis for redlining, which he freely admits is the minority opinion in the matter.
More importantly, the claim that the government and the liberals hounded banks into offering subprime loans, and that it wasn't just the dollar signs in their eyes that made them do it.
These things may be true or may not, but I would like to see better evidence before I simply accept them as facts.
On the other hand
1. The author, Stan Liebowitz, is "the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas"---not exactly unqualified to speak on the subject.
2. The New York Post may run a lot of salacious pieces, but how often does the NYPost run an overtly discriminatory and salacious piece?
Remember, this is the paper your New York workers read on the train on the way to work. That's about as mixed a bag as you can get. The New York Post, like every other New York paper, does its damnedest to appeal to the widest possible spectrum. The Post is a liberal paper. You can call it conservative, but only when you're comparing it to the NY Times. This makes the article interesting, and it should at least give you pause.
It's easy to take a snotty attitude against reading something like the Post, but the article, which admittedly isn't that great, raises an interesting point. In America we purposefully overlook a lot of things in the name of equality. In underwriting you don't want overlook anything.
The financial analysts who failed to analyze this situation are responsible for the crisis. So are the former home owners who defaulted on their loans. And the people who issued them those loans. But when good analysis is restricted by federal law, and bad analysis is incentivized, how much blame can you place on analysts before next placing it on legislation? Regardless of how much blame you assign to the legislation, you must now multiply that manyfold. This is a little thing that has made a big difference.
The point is that we have to ask ourselves what level of abstraction we are willing to force onto the notion of a person. Are we willing to turn so much of a blind eye that it throws us into economic recession?
This recession is likely to be mild, but deep recessions are a time of great uncertainty. You don't have to read very far back in history to learn that people tend to stop overlooking things when their pocketbooks are empty. Equality, in other words, is a luxury item, and like many of the things we enjoy in America, it's contingent on our economy not exploding.