Richard Spencer

October 25, 2008

Steve Sailer has some more vintage Greenspan up on his blog, including this quote from a speech at the Community Affairs Research Conference in 2005, at the height of the housing bubble: 

Therefore, it is essential that policymakers, regulators, bankers, researchers, and consumer groups remain fully engaged in monitoring developments in the consumer finance market and continually seek to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the financial services industry, including how well it serves lower-income and underserved consumers. [Sailer: ‘Underserved’ is a euphemism for minority.]

[…]

Access to credit has enabled families to purchase homes, deal with emergencies, and obtain goods and services. Home ownership is at a record high, and the number of home mortgage loans to low- and moderate-income and minority families has risen rapidly over the past five years. Credit cards and installment loans are also available to the vast majority of households.

Greenspan’s prose is famously opaque, but the Fed chairman seems at least partially aware that his easy-credit policies were integral to the “bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities,” that is, “The Diversity Recession.”