In finance, subprime lending (also referred to as near-prime, non-prime, and second-chance lending) means making loans to people who may have difficulty maintaining the repayment schedule. These loans are characterized by higher interest rates, poor quality collateral, and less favorable terms in order to compensate for higher credit risk.
Proponents of subprime lending maintain that the practice extends credit to people who would otherwise not have access to the credit market. Professor Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton University explained, "The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated-against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment."
Read more about Subprime Lending: Defining Subprime Risk, Student Loans, United States, Canada, Subprime Crisis, See Also
Famous quotes containing the word lending:
“And lending it one mental fillip the more, the fact that all these people were inwardly attacked by well-nigh resistless decay, and that most of them were feverish.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)