CRL in the News

Ezekiel Gorrocino, a policy associate for the Center for Responsible Lending, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that fights predatory lending practices, described the legislation as a “prepackaged” bill that payday lending companies have pushed over the past few years across the country.

“This extreme legislation would put the foxes back in charge of guarding the hen house by putting big banks and predatory lenders back in charge of our economy,” Yana Miles, senior legislative counsel for CRL, said in a statement.

One clear lesson from the financial crisis is that common-sense rules of the road in our financial markets would have prevented the damage. It may seem amazing now that banking regulators would have to pass rules requiring lenders to make sure borrowers could actually repay mortgage loans, but that was the case only seven years ago.

Under the qualified mortgage rules, banks are largely banned from offering certain "harmful loan features," such as an “interest-only” period, loan principals that increase over time, balloon payments that come due at the end of a loan term and loan terms longer than 30 years. Such loans are safer for the financial industry and perform better for banks, says Sarah...

The non-partisan Center for Responsible Lending says the debt burden falls on low-income, female and minority students who disproportionately enroll at Maine for-profit schools. About 75 percent of students at such institutions take on student loans, compared with 66 percent and 41 percent, respectively, at private and public institutions.

Maine students attending private, for-profit colleges are quicker to borrow and slower to repay their student loans when compared to the their counterparts across the country, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

Diane Standaert is with the Center for Responsible Lending. That group has heard from borrowers that title pawn employees often don't offer up details about the length or cost of the loans. Standaert said federal regulators have been working to change that.

Yet banks are very much involved in the lives of the unbankable. They securitize and sell payday loan and car title loan debt. Title loans take the borrower’s car as collateral—when the note comes due the borrower can either re-borrow, pay fees or lose the car. Combined, these two loan types drain over $8 billion a year from consumers, said...

For Wells Fargo to truly fix itself, it needs to step up oversight of all of its businesses, said Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending in Washington. “The test for the company is whether they can create products that benefits consumers and helps the bottom line,” Calhoun said.

Mike Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending, told BuzzFeed News that the record levels of credit card debt shows that financial regulations introduced after the 2008 crisis did not kill the market for consumer lending, as the industry and some government officials believed they would.