Wells Fargo accused of pushing bad loans on African-Americans

Filed in archive mortgage news on June 8, 2009

Whenever I tell people that borrowers shouldn't always be blamed for the bad mortgage loans that they take out, I get sneers. These borrowers should have done their homework before taking out a mortgage loan that they eventually wouldn't be able to pay, people will say to me.

What they fail to grasp is that mortgage loan officers are supposed to be looking out for the best interests of their clients at all times. They're the experts. When they push a certain loan at borrowers, they're supposed to be doing it because it makes the most sense. After all, these loan officers are paid to know everything there is to know about mortgage loans.

Problem is, during the height of the housing boom, many mortgage loan officers — not all of them, certainly, but many of them — pushed bad loans on their borrowers. Many loan officers pushed interest-only loans. These came with extremely low initial interest rates. They then adjusted, and when that happened, many borrowers couldn't afford to make their payments. Of course, when loan officers originally sold these mortgages, they told their borrowers that they could simply refinance their interest-only loans into standard 30-year or 15-year fixed-rate mortgages. That was before the housing crash. Now, many borrowers who need to refinance out of their interest-only loans can't do so. They're stuck.

That's just one example. The New York Times is running a story on their Web site that highlights another particularly disturbing example of loan officers who definitely didn't act with the best interests of their clients in mind.

According to the story, Wells Fargo Bank singled out African-American borrowers in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

Baltimore has since filed a lawsuit against Wells Fargo. The city claims that these bad mortgage loans pushed hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

According to the lawsuit, Wells Fargo loan officers encouraged African-American borrowers to take out subprime mortgages even if they qualified for traditional prime mortgages. The difference is big: Subprime loans, because they are riskier, come with higher mortgage interest rates than do prime mortgage loans.

The lesson here is an important one: Mortgage loan officers don't always have the best interests of their customers in mind. Borrowers who are uncomfortable with their loan officers, no matter the reason, should simply walk away. There are more than enough mortgage loan officers out there. There's no reason for borrowers to work with any that they suspect may not be looking out for them first.