CRL in the News

“The current economic crisis has added crushing debt onto the backs of Americans who can least afford it, which is disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native American communities,” observed Lisa Stifler, the Center for Responsible Lending’s Director of State Policy. “Payday and other high-cost, predatory loans make this situation even worse. Strong loan interest rate caps on the state and federal...

Student debt in this country now exceeds credit card debt at $1.7 trillion of debt held by 44 million people. Calls are mounting for President Biden to fulfill a campaign promise to tackle this issue. Ashley Harrington, the Federal Advocacy Director of the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), explains how student debt disproportionately impacts communities of color, particularly Black Americans.

Consumer advocates are very alarmed by the underlying power imbalance between wage-access providers and the low-income workers they serve, exposing once again Silicon Valley’s penchant for dressing up in utopian visions the dystopian brutality of its desire to make money. “If you think about someone working at Walmart, Target, someone like that,” says Keith Corbett, of the Center for Responsible...

Los hispanos y afroamericanos enfrentan múltiples barreras raciales para acceder a préstamos hipotecarios y tener vivienda propia. La situación -lejos de mejorar- empeoró, advirtió el Centro para Préstamos Responsables.

This is causing frustration for people helping small business owners prepare to apply, like Rochelle Sparko, the director of North Carolina Policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. She says this could end up hurting the businesses the changes intended to help. In reality, she says there isn’t really a two-week window dedicated to the smallest businesses. More like 7...

Before the pandemic, some 800,000 self-employed people were behind on their student loans, according to a recent report by the Center for Responsible Lending. And some 500,000 people of color may have been shut out of PPP help because of the exclusion of struggling student loan borrowers.

To help consumers put these recent changes into perspective, the Center for Responsible Lending analyzed the average APR for a $300 loan in each state based on a 14-day loan term. Generally, payday lenders levy a “finance charge” for each loan, which includes service fees and interest, so many times consumers don’t always know exactly how much interest they’re paying.

For Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, Biden’s Racial Equity Initiative is “a critical first step by his administration to address injustices that are holding our country back” and “will help to move the nation closer to its ideals and center solutions to discrimination that hinder opportunity, allowing marginalized communities to move closer to equal...

Those who stand to benefit most from the Democrat’s proposal include Black and Latino Americans who have historically lacked access to higher education, and are more likely to take on student loan debt and struggle with repayment. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, nearly 85 percent of Black bachelor’s degree recipients carry student debt, compared with 69 percent of...

Trump's Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to help small businesses stay afloat during the COVID-19 crisis, so naturally loans went to his friends and huge companies. We talked to Ashley Harrington of ResponsibleLending.org and the small business owners of 46 Mott, Fan Fan Donuts, Brown Butter, ConBody, and Kato Sake about the ramifications of that corruption.