Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.

I am not convinced this situation is at all analogous. Consider the following three facts: 1) The geographical distribution of blacks, hispanics, and whites is not random -- there is considerable segregation by race; 2)In the aggregate, blacks and hispanics have lower average credit rating than whites; 3)If your neighbor defaults/is foreclosed, your own property value falls.

This would suggest that more higher-credit minorities would get dragged down by their neighbors than would white homeowners with equal credit scores. But an individual's intelligence is not dependent on the intelligence of his neighbor, at least not at remotely the strength of causation that his property value is related to the property value of his neighbor.

La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement - that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as whites have lower levels of achievement, though I do not recall what evidence he presented for this claim.

GPA is a good basis for comparison within a school, but it is not a good basis for comparison between schools, so this is not surprising, considering that the average majority-minority school is less well-resourced than the average majority-white school. (I would suggest that standardized measures like the SAT are better than GPA, but unfortunately that is a highly imperfect solution as well.

All three claims could be simultaneously true if we suppose that accomplishment reflects IQ and character, and that assessing an IQ indicator alone is not sufficient to swamp one's priors.

I would say that the claim "Blacks on average have worse character than whites" is far more dubious on a simple empirical level than "Blacks on average have lower IQ than whites" (and the precise determination of "character" is doing a lot of work in this formulation). This makes the situation worse, not better.