Black and Hispanic borrowers were charged higher interest rates on their mortgages more often than their white counterparts, official US figures showed yesterday.

The numbers also indicated that lenders turned down potential borrowers who were from ethnic minorities more often than for whites.

Banking regulators will now trawl through the raw data and try to ascertain whether lenders discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers who were charged more to own their own homes or whether their loans attracted higher interest rates because borrowers had bad credit histories.

Whatever their conclusions, the numbers raise fears that black and Hispanic people will be worst hit by the US housing slump and more likely to lose their homes than whites.

A high proportion of these high-interest loans have escalating rates, with the cost of servicing the debt rising throughout the life of the mortgage.

A number of such sub-prime borrowers will see the interest rate on their mortgage rise by the end of the year.

Economists expect the number of mortgage foreclosures to surge towards the end of the year.

The statistics were compiled by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, the umbrella agency for America’s financial regulatory agencies, as part of the group’s annual analysis of lending practices in the US.

Banks are required by law to be fair in their lending practices under two pieces of legislation – the Equal Credit Opportunities Act and the Fair Housing Act.

Since 2004, American banks have been required to produce details of who they lend to and how much they charge.

A high interest rate is defined as a mortgage rate which is at least 3 per cent higher than the coupon on an equivalent Treasury bond.

For example, the annual interest rate on a 30-year mortgage would be compared with the annual rate paid on a 30-year US Treasury bond.

Andrew Beveridge, a leading US demographer at Queens College in New York, told The Times yesterday: “The issue is whether the data relates to being black or whether it relates to some other economic factor.”

Professor Beveridge explained: “America has a lot of history here [lending discrimination]. In the 1930s, ‘red-lining’ was common practice, where banks would draw a red line through neighbourhoods.

"If you wanted to move to that neighbourhood, you would not have been able to get a mortgage there, because blacks lived there. Is there still evidence that some lending discrimination is going on? The answer is probably some.”

The Federal Reserve Bank, included in the FFIEC, itself regulates about 900 banks. If the Fed finds evidence of discriminatory lending practices, it can impose a number of corrective measures including the sacking of certain employees or fines.

In a draft report published on the Fed’s website, the central bank said: “The incidence of higher priced lending for blacks and Hispanic white borrowers is notably greater than for nonHispanic whites. Similar patterns are shown in racial and ethnic differences in denial rates.”

According to the statistics, black borrowers were given high interest mortgages 53.7 per cent of the time in 2006, compared with 54.7 per cent of the time the year before. Hispanic borrowers were charged more 46.6 per cent of the time in 2006, compared with 46.1 per cent in 2005.

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