Goulden is concerned that claimants having to wait for the initial payment, and without access to mainstream credit, will turn to subprime lenders.
Those with top-tier credit scores actually saw their access to revolving credit increase, but subprime borrowers, with the riskiest credit profiles, saw it drop.
Spurred at first by financial deregulation in the early 1980's and more recently by access to Wall Street's secondary mortgage market, subprime home equity lending has become an increasingly important feature in the consumer finance landscape.
Nothing is more dear to a finance company, especially one with a heavy hand in the subprime market, than its access to credit, something Countrywide Financial and others are finding out all too painfully.
Such economically anxious voters, here as in earlier primary states, represent prime targets for Mrs. Clinton's message of expanding access to health care and freezing interest rates on adjustable "subprime" mortgage loans for five years.
Fitch now says that it will no longer rate subprime mortgage securities unless it is provided access to loan files.
This is the sort of regulation that can stop predatory lending without taking back any of the new access to home ownership that millions of Americans have gained through subprime loans.
Mr. Obama's plan emphasizes making it easier to convert subprime loans to fixed-rate, 30-year loans, while requiring that borrowers have access to better data on loan costs and requiring greater scrutiny of lenders.
It's similarly comparable to the housing bubble due to the failure of financial institutions to appreciate risk, as we've seen, with subprime mortgages being packaged up into mortgage-backed securities, so that everyone could have access to assets that were thought to only be able to increase in value.
But they argue that on balance, subprime lending has been beneficial because it has given people who previously did not have access to credit the ability to buy homes.
He called the results the best evidence yet of racial discrimination in loan decisions by banks and so-called subprime lenders that charge high fees and interest for home equity loans to borrowers with limited access to credit.
