OK, fair point, the NYPost is not the gold standard in economic analysis.
On the other hand
1. The author, Stan Liebowitz, is "the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas"---not exactly unqualified to speak on the subject.
2. The New York Post may run a lot of salacious pieces, but how often does the NYPost run an overtly discriminatory and salacious piece?
Remember, this is the paper your New York workers read on the train on the way to work. That's about as mixed a bag as you can get. The New York Post, like every other New York paper, does its damnedest to appeal to the widest possible spectrum. The Post is a liberal paper. You can call it conservative, but only when you're comparing it to the NY Times. This makes the article interesting, and it should at least give you pause.
It's easy to take a snotty attitude against reading something like the Post, but the article, which admittedly isn't that great, raises an interesting point. In America we purposefully overlook a lot of things in the name of equality. In underwriting you don't want overlook anything.
The financial analysts who failed to analyze this situation are responsible for the crisis. So are the former home owners who defaulted on their loans. And the people who issued them those loans. But when good analysis is restricted by federal law, and bad analysis is incentivized, how much blame can you place on analysts before next placing it on legislation? Regardless of how much blame you assign to the legislation, you must now multiply that manyfold. This is a little thing that has made a big difference.
The point is that we have to ask ourselves what level of abstraction we are willing to force onto the notion of a person. Are we willing to turn so much of a blind eye that it throws us into economic recession?
This recession is likely to be mild, but deep recessions are a time of great uncertainty. You don't have to read very far back in history to learn that people tend to stop overlooking things when their pocketbooks are empty. Equality, in other words, is a luxury item, and like many of the things we enjoy in America, it's contingent on our economy not exploding.