Jumping To Conclusions

The New York Times loves this stuff: black and hispanic people pay higher interest rates for their mortgages than white people do. Or at least a new study being released today by the Center for Community Change claims that this is true. (According to the Times; I failed to find the study on the organization's badly-organized website.)

A far greater share of black and Hispanic homeowners with above-average incomes still have mortgages with higher interest rates than whites with comparable incomes, according to a study to be released today. The research suggests that conventional banks, despite recent progress, have failed to reach many minority borrowers who would qualify for good mortgages based on their salary and credit history, housing experts said.

In its most surprising finding, the study said that the racial disparities increased as homeowners' salaries rose. Among households that made at least 120 percent of the typical income in their metropolitan area, 32 percent of blacks held high-interest, or subprime, loans while only 11 percent of whites did. Among households that made 80 percent or less of the typical local salary, 56 percent of blacks had subprime loans and 25 percent of whites did.

"The market isn't working as it should," said Allen J. Fishbein, general counsel at the Center for Community Change, a housing advocacy group in Washington that conducted the study. "It's pretty striking."

The market isn't working as it should. Groups that produce absolutely no value for society, like the Center for Community Change, somehow manage to stay in "business". They can produce "research" with absolutely zero value, and yet somehow never get discredited. They can study the granting of credit by lenders without actually looking at the factors that lenders use in granting credit, and the Paper of Record still thinks they're worthy of receiving press coverage:

The study's authors acknowledged that their findings did not prove that minority borrowers unfairly pay high mortgage rates, because applicants' credit histories were not considered. But the authors said the gaps between subprime lending to whites and minority borrowers were probably too big to reflect only credit differences.

"Probably?" Ah. I believe that's the method lenders use for granting credit: "Well, you didn't put this information on the application, but you'll 'probably' pay it back. Have some money." Wouldn't science be so much easier if we could use the "probably" standard?