CRL in the News
David Silberman, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsible Lending, said this is part of a bigger problem. “Credit scores very much are reflecting of the history of discrimination in the country,” he said. Silberman, who spent a decade at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and years in the financial services industry, has thought about how algorithms can reflect privilege, or the lack thereof.
“Cancelling $50,000 in student loan debt is the minimum needed to begin addressing the racial wealth gap,” said Jaylon Herbin, policy and outreach manager and student loan lead at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). “Student debt most negatively impacts those historically marginalized through systemic inequalities that have only continued to grow. President Biden can and should use the authority of executive action to uphold the administration’s commitment to helping communities of color and women, who deserve the ability to build their American dream.”
"We applaud President Biden and Vice President Harris for this move," Whitney Barkley, the Center for Responsible Lending's senior policy counsel, said. "Tens of thousands of former Corinthian students who had been defrauded by their school, and left wondering for years how they’d recover the money they lost, are now at ease. The administration now needs to immediately cancel $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower and abandon its piecemeal approach to cancellation.
ARMs haven’t been much in demand in recent years because rates on predictable, fixed-rate mortgages remained low. They also earned a bad reputation in the financial crisis, when underqualified borrowers lured in by the initially low interest rates were unable to keep up payments when they rose.
Laws passed after the financial crisis made ARMs “much safer and more transparent than they used to be,” said Eric Stein, senior vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has vetoed a bill that would have allowed consumer lenders to offer short-term installment loans with triple-digit interest rates.
The bill sought to establish a new type of consumer loan of up to $1,500 and with a term of between 90 days and one year. Edwards, a Democrat, objected to the prices that the measure would have allowed lenders to charge.
Such rates are illegal in most states for lenders that aren't banks, but EasyPay issues the loans through Transportation Alliance, allowing them to be classified as bank loans, a practice known as "rent-a-bank," according to a coalition of advocacy groups, including the National Consumer Law Center, the Center for Responsible Lending and the National Military Family Association.
High home prices aren’t the only reason behind dwindling homeownership in the U.S. Banks and financial institutions aren’t issuing enough small-dollar mortgages that help families with modest incomes to purchase a property.
“It is particularly hard for people who are buying smaller houses with smaller mortgages to find a lender and to get that mortgage,” said Mike Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending. “And they also surprisingly are more expensive.”