[BretLudwig]

How much of the Housing Bubble took place in Spanish?

"The NYT article on Clinton Housing and Urban Development secretary
Henry Cisneros's role in debauching mortgage credit standards in the name
of helping lower income people get their hands on the American Dream
raises a question that I've wondering about for awhile. I suspect that
when the dust settles and we finally realize what an outsized role
Hispanics had in mortgage defaults that set off the global credit crisis,
we'll begin to realize that one reason the insanity of the Bubble years
stayed somewhat under the national radar was that some of the very worst
aspects of it were being conducted in Spanish. For example, Spanish
language radio stations are hurting financially right now because they had
been getting so much advertising from mortgage brokers and real estate
agents. (When you read about some poor illegal immigrant maid taking out a
$400,000 loan that she didn't understand from a predatory lender, read
carefully and you'll note that the "predatory lender" who talked her into
was almost always a Spanish-speaker himself.)

And there were a lot of English-speaking working-class Hispanics who got
in on the bubble, too, but they are almost equally invisible to the NY-DC
axis of power and influence in this country."



http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/10/h...ook-place.html

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