CRL in the News

“If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is now,” observed Whitney Barkley-Denney, a senior policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending. “The Department of Education and Secretary DeVos are more interested in shielding corporate actors like Navient and for-profit colleges from taking responsibility for their bad acts.”

According to Ashley Harrington, policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending, the "proposed draft reads more like a roadmap for institutions seeking to abuse students and avoid accountability and transparency rather than a plan to protect students and taxpayers."

"While Ms. Kraninger's own status as one of 44 million Americans with outstanding student loan debt provides her with some insight, this is but a drop compared to a tidal wave of evidence weighing against her nomination," said Ashley Harrington, counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. "Student borrowers need a director who will be their champion - she is not that person."

“Mulvaney’s decision to halt the CFPB from moving forward on addressing abusive overdraft fee practices will severely impact poor families and communities of color,” said Rebecca Borne, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending.

Many Americans have felt the frustration of getting the run-around from a customer service agent or finding an unhelpful recording at the end of a financial company’s complaint line. When someone has been cheated out of money and their family’s wellbeing is at stake, this experience is more than an annoyance — it’s an injustice that for too long left people with little recourse. That is, until 2011 when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau launched the consumer complaint database, which documents and helps people resolve disputes with financial companies.

“When you’re dealing with primary residences, that’s a situation that could have potential lifetime repercussions,” said Scott B. Astrada, director of federal advocacy for the Center for Responsible Lending. “Some of the models I’ve seen raise a lot of questions and concerns that we don’t have answers to yet — and I don’t think anyone does.” He also questioned what would prevent the companies from ignoring low-income, minority, and rural communities that have seen slow growth in real estate values following the Great Recession.

Many African American households are worse off than they were 30 years ago. About eight percent of African-American homeowners lost their properties to foreclosure from 2007 to 2009, according to estimates from the Center for Responsible Lending. Also, only 43% of black people owned homes in 2017 , according to an annual report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

“Mulvaney’s decision to halt the CFPB from moving forward on addressing abusive overdraft fee practices will severely impact poor families and communities of color,” said Rebecca Borne, Senior Policy Counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending in response.

"We need a CFPB director that's going to hold Wall Street accountable and transparent to the public, someone with a proven track record of going to bat for consumers - Kathy Kraninger is not that person," said Debbie Goldstein, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending.

“Kathy Kraninger’s nomination is just a political play for Mick Mulvaney to cement his anti-consumer agenda at the CFPB,” said Debbie Goldstein, executive vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending. “She has no experience in protecting Americans from predatory lenders and has a record of mismanagement that’s harmed families across the country.”