Research & Policy

"Steered Wrong" Executive Summary In recent years, a majority of subprime loans made in the United States have been originated by mortgage brokers, who can properly be characterized as the "engine" of the subprime market. The rapid growth of subprime lending was fueled by thousands of mortgage brokers across the country delivering billions of dollars of subprime loans to mortgage...

Full Session Law (pdf) Bill Summary (pdf) This legislation requires mortgage loan servicers doing business in North Carolina to be licensed and imposes new standards on their loan collection activities, providing more protection for North Carolina homeowners. This bill adds mortgage servicing regulation to the regulation of mortgage bankers and mortgage brokers. New duties for mortgage servicers include: Safeguarding and...

In this report, we estimate how many homes—including families who are paying their mortgage on time—will suffer a decline in property values because of foreclosures in their neighborhoods. We also estimate how much the average family will lose in home equity, and how much of an impact the foreclosure crisis will have on city and county coffers.

OVERDRAFT LOAN = HIGH-COST NO-CHOICE CREDIT Protection? More like small loans with abusive terms. Banks and credit unions now enroll many of their account holders into the most expensive option for covering overdrafts—an option customers generally don't want and didn't ask for—and leave them without the information they need to protect their funds. Under these systems, financial institutions routinely approve...

Committee: California State Senate Banking, Finance & Insurance Committee

Committee: U.S. House Committee on Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity

Committee: Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee

Court-supervised modifications: Preventing foreclosures and lost community wealth No matter where you live, the subprime crisis is causing unnecessary foreclosures and draining resources in your community. By lifting the ban on court-supervised load modifications for qualified homeowners, Congress can help nearly 600,000 families nationwide keep their homes and help communities retain an estimated $89 million in tax revenues. To find...

This report is part of CRL's continuing Countrywide Watch project, which is dedicated to tracking Countrywide's conduct and efforts to reform the company. Analysis of customer complaints, lawsuits, regulatory actions, news accounts, government reports and company documents identifies several areas of concern, including predatory lending, the marketing of dangerous products, loan servicing abuses and weak corporate governance. The Center for...

After denying for months that a foreclosure crisis even exists, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) now claims lenders are making "vast efforts" to prevent foreclosure. Unfortunately, the numbers show little progress. During the third quarter of 2007, mortgage lenders started about 213,000 foreclosures on subprime loans, but offered meaningful fixes ("loan modifications") on only 28,000. What are Loan Modifications? When...

January 28, 2008 (PDF) April 14, 2008 (PDF) June 2, 2008 (PDF)

>>Take Action: Ask your Senators to support S2452 In brief, the Homeownership Preservation and Protection Act sponsored by Senator Christopher Dodd and other leaders in the Senate will achieve these key goals: Establish new protections for all consumers. It will stop brokers from steering prime borrowers into more expensive subprime loans, create a duty for mortgage brokers to consider the...

Read the Executive Summary 36% Cap Springs the Trap Measures short of an interest rate cap fail to fix payday lending problem The debt trap of payday lending persists even in states that have put restrictions on payday loans while exempting them from interest rate caps. In "Springing the Debt Trap," CRL finds that high numbers of borrowers are still...

Payday loans carry an annual interest rate of 391 percent and are so difficult to pay off that many borrowers end up paying more in interest than they originally borrowed, as documented in our report entitled, Financial Quicksand. Payday lenders renew their loans to the same borrowers many times per year, either by rolling them over for another term, or...