CRL in the News

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...

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...

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...

That less-than-personal touch has given ammunition to critics, who say deceptive interfaces and bogus promotions of “community” are used by cash-advance apps to persuade customers to tip the businesses as if they are Uber drivers. “It’s a bad incentive structure that simply seeks to kind of shroud these fees and the actual cost of the service of the loan from...

“It's great that a lot of large financial institutions are making a move away from fee-based overdraft for their customers,” says Peter Smith, a senior researcher for the left-leaning Center for Responsible Lending who’s focused on overdraft practices. But Smith doesn’t see a few large banks changing their fees as sufficient. Especially given that nearly 18% of consumers with a...

“It really does shift the onus on the president to make his plans clear sooner rather than later,” said Whitney Barkley-Denney, a senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. “There’s a time crunch here,” Barkley-Denney said. “People need to make plans for how they are going to handle this loan debt going forward.”

Reclassification could lead to more stringent oversight and prevent predatory practices involving ISAs, said Whitney Barkley-Denney, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. "If you give money to someone with expectations that you will pay them back," she said, "that's a loan."

“Once again, Americans who work, pay taxes and tried to do the right thing have been used as cash cows to enrich unaccountable investors and corporate executives,” says Jaylon Herbin, student loan outreach and policy manager at CRL. “The true victims of these abusive loan schemes deserve to have this government-imposed weight removed from their shoulders.”

“They are marketing very heavily to an audience that is younger, that might not just have as much experience on how to use credit and what credit implications are or what it means to have multiple loans at one time,” Marisabel Torres, the California policy director of the Center for Responsible Lending, told SFGATE.