Excerpt from Fair Lending Enforcement and the Data on the 1992 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (Hmda): Hearing Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs United States Senate One Hundred Third Congress First Session The committee met at 10:08 a.m., in room SD-538 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (chairman of the committee) presiding. Opening Statement Of Chairman Donald W. Riegle, Jr. The Chairman. The committee will come to order. Let me welcome all those in attendance this morning. I want to particularly welcome at the outset our distinguished Attorney General of the United States who is with us, and our Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. After we have heard from them, we have other distinguished witnesses later in the morning which I'll introduce at that time. We are meeting here today to consider the 1992 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, referred to as the HMDA data, and with that, the administration's fair lending enforcement efforts. This hearing is part of a long, continuing effort by this committee to confront and finally eliminate the problem of racial discrimination in lending here in the United States. During my tenure as chairman of the committee, we have given this issue an absolute top priority, equal to any other that we've been asked to confront because combating lending discrimination is really essential to making the whole concept of America work for all of our citizens. In the past, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data has suggested a very stark disparity in lending between minority applicants and nonminority or white applicants. And unfortunately, the 1992 HMDA data, which we are going to review today, seems to indicate that that problem continues to persist. The problem of lending discrimination is not only morally wrong, but it is illegal. It violates the laws of this land and therefore, must be stopped where it is found. Redlining, housing discrimination, and all forms of lending discrimination were outlawed by the law of this country under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. And specific legislation to end the credit plight of low-income and minority persons did not end with those two landmark pieces of legislation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.