Race and Gender Quotas Inserted into Financial Reform Bill

The kind of useful dorks who enjoy digging into the guts of proposed statutes have unearthed a real gem — racial and gender quotas imposed on financial companies hidden deep within the financial reform bill.

The problem with this is not only the inherent dishonesty of slipping a highly controversial social policy into a bill that is being sold to the public as an essential tool to prevent another economic collapse.  The problem here is that the policy being enacted would actively undermine the financial system by forcing financial firms to fight endless rounds of litigation over whether or not they have adopted exactly the right mix of racial and gender groups.  Given the bottomless resources giving to government enforcers in this area and the equally bottomless zealotry of those convinced that racism and sexism lurks everywhere, it is reasonable to predict that such lawsuits would proliferate by the hundreds, if not thousands.

Apparently, race-baiters have totally failed to come to terms with their own role in producing the financial crisis in the first place.  While it is true that much of the bubble in real estate markets resulted from consumers using their houses as ATMs and large banks seeking to cash in on exotic “mortgage-backed securities” that no one really understood, another part was the forced granting of high-risk loans to preferred racial groups under the “Community Reinvestment Act”.  The mandate was imposed on banks in an effort to combat what some contended was a racial system of “red-lining” where bankers would refuse to give loans to minorities.  The goal may have been good, but simply empowering self-styled community activists to file lawsuits unless banks gave loans to their preferred groups (and their chosen friends in particular) was a recipe for corruption, extortion, and the granting of huge numbers of bad loans.

By inserting a race-baiting and gender-baiting provision into the financial reform bill, the grievance industry has shown that they are not yet done using America’s financial system as a vehicle for their crusade, no matter what the cost.