We've now entered a new stage of the financial crisis: the ritual assigning of blame.

It began in
earnest with Monday's congressional roasting of Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, and
continued on Tuesday with Capitol Hill solons delving into the failure of AIG. On the
Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial
media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole
mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and
the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA,
which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long,
distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.

The thesis is laid out almost daily on The Wall Street Journal editorial page and in the National
Review.Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example,
writingthat "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He
continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977,
there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to
people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic
discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages
to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root
of our current calamity." The subtext: if only Congress didn't force banks to lend money to poor
minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel's Neil
Cavuto put it: "I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster.
Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

Let me get this straight. Investment banks and insurance companies run by centimillionaires
blow up, and it's the fault of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and poor minorities?

These arguments are generally made by people who read the editorial page of The Wall Street
Journal, and ignore the rest of the paper—economic know-nothings whose opinions are informed
mostly by ideology and, occasionally, by prejudice. Let's be honest. Fannie and Freddie, which
didn't make subprime loans but did buy subprime loans made by others, were part of the
problem. Poor congressional oversight was part of the problem. Banks that sought to meet CRA
requirements by indiscriminately doling out loans to minorities may have been part of the
problem. But none of these issues is the cause of the problem. Not by a long shot. From the
beginning, subprime has been a symptom, not a cause. And the notion that the Community
Reinvestment Act is somehow responsible for poor lending decisions is absurd.

Here's why.

The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that
spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits
such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the
Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions
worked hand in glove with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, entities to which the CRA
likewise didn't apply. There's much more. As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA
didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no-money down, or to throw underwriting
standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new
markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on subprime
debt.

Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime
lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime
purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of
now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or
minorities—unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities. The multi-year
plague that has been documented in brilliant detail at IrvineHousingBlog is playing out in one of
the least subprime housing markets in the nation.

Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of
evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of
micro lending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as The
New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes
and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a
repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer
than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.

On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld
of Lehman Brothers, or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it's even more
risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And, here, again, it's difficult to imagine
how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the
financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision
of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage
ratio of 33:1, that instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions
of their clients money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his
company ran into trouble. Perhaps Neil Cavuto knows which CRA clause required Lehman
Brothers to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt in the capital markets and
then buy tens of billions of dollars of commercial real estate at the top of the market. I can't find
it. Did AIG plunge into the credit-default swaps business with abandon because ACORN
members picketed its offices? Please. How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged
loans—loans banks committed to private equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts
of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is
that Bill Clinton's fault?

Look. There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and
the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb lending virus originated in Greenwich,
Ct., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and
Washington. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a
new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they
made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and
for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.
At Monday's hearing, Republican Rep. John Mica of Florida gamely tried to pin Lehman's
demise on Fannie and Freddie. After comparing Lehman's small political contributions to Fannie
and Freddie's much larger ones, Mica asked Fuld what role Fannie and Freddie's failure played in
Lehman's demise. Fuld's response: "de minimis."

Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people
does.