It has been the DOJ's experience that the greatest value of the monitoring data has been to inform lender management of the status of fair mortgage lending in their institutions. We believe these efforts have been successful, and we have every reason to believe that lenders would use similar data in the same positive way with respect to business and consumer loans. Without monitoring information, the ability of the DOJ and the regulators to detect price discrimination in consumer loans or discriminatory business loan denials will be severely limited . We have reason to believe that price discrimination in lending may be widespread. Chairman Greenspan has called for fighting discrimination in lending not just on moral grounds, but on economic grounds.
Discrimination is patently immoral, but it is now increasingly being seen as unprofitable.
Prices, interest rates, stock prices, and other signals produced by market economies to encourage the distribution of productive resources have no inherent moral content. In the end, costs are higher, less real output is produced, and national wealth accumulation is slowed. The Board left open the possibility of revising Regulation B to improve protection against discrimination, should additional information suggest that such changes were appropriate. The experience we have had with home mortgage loan data collection and monitoring indicates that extending such requirements to business and consumer loans will have a similar laudatory effect.