Fundamentally, the CRA is a regulatory effort to "lean on" banks and savings institutions, in vague and subjective ways, to make loans and investments that those depository institutions would otherwise not make. It is a continued effort to preserve old structures in the face of a modernizing financial economy. At base, the CRA is an anachronistic and protectionist effort to force artificially a local focus for finance in an increasingly competitive, increasingly electronic, and ever-widening realm of financial services.
