Narrative of 'Fog-a-Mirror Finance' Era Needs New Look

The perceived wisdom that the pre-2008 mortgage market was an era of automatic pulse loans made to anyone with a heartbeat and fog-a-mirror finance may need some rethinking, analyses of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data show. In fact, in the biggest racial category, loans to whites, denials were an even larger percentage of the total a decade ago than they are now. A look at a 10-year study of originations, denials and fallout by Maurice Jourdain-Earl, managing director of ComplianceTech, shows that whites, for instance, were denied at an 18.7% rate in 2004 - higher than the 17.3% rate shown in 2013's supposedly tighter underwriting era.