Research

Reckless lending practices that became rampant in recent years have devastated the economy, costing Americans billions of dollars in lost wealth and resulting in the weakest economy since the great Depression. Unfortunately, the regulators overseeing bank safety and consumer protections fell down on the job. Congress has taken a number of actions to investigate the causes of the financial meltdown...

EXCERPT Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Bachus, members of the Committee: Thank you for inviting the Center for Responsible Lending to discuss consumer financial products reform – a fundamental component of the effort to modernize and repair our financial regulatory system. Over the past decade, federal bank regulators looked the other way as responsible loans were crowded out of the market...

Loan terms are often complex and may include a number of extra fees that make the real cost to the borrower difficult to decipher and difficult to compare across credit options. Congress developed the APR, or Annual Percentage Rate of Interest, as a standard measure that calculates the simple interest rate on an annual basis (including most fees), accounts for...

Payday lending—the provision of 459% APR loans to cash-strapped borrowers—drains more than $450 million from California's pockets every year. Payday lending requires borrowers to supply a post-dated check as collateral and typically only their identification and proof of income to obtain a loan at nearly 459% APR. These loans are marketed as "emergency" loans for borrowers who are having a...

Quick Facts on Payday Loan Amounts Nearly 80 percent of payday borrowers report that the amount they received was the amount they needed 90 percent of payday borrowers whose loan was insufficient didn't take out a new payday loan Borrowers whose loans were insufficient typically postponed purchases, did without and borrowed from friends and family A key provision of AB...

"Stacked Deck" is a statistical analysis of outcomes in forced arbitration, also called mandatory arbitration or binding mandatory arbitration, that finds: Individual arbitrators have a strong incentive to favor the firms that provide them with repeat business over an individual consumer they may never see again. Companies win a favorable ruling in arbitration far more often than consumers. Companies involved...

How OTS allowed reckless and unfair lending to fleece homeowners and cripple the nation's savings and loan industry. Although the Office of Thrift Supervision was created as a result of the first savings & loan crisis, history repeated itself as the OTS ignored bad lending practices and allowed thrifts to self-destruct. OTS permitted WaMu, IndyMac and other thrifts to engage...

A Comparison of House (Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights) and the Senate Amendment (formerly known as the Credit CARD Act) Legislation by the Congressional Research Service.

CRL Offers Quick Snapshot of Recent Issuer Activity We took a quick sampling of credit card issuers' recent activities to see how they have responded to the Federal Reserve rule changes that were announced in December, 2008 but won't take effect until July, 2010. We found the top eight issuers, who account for 80 percent of credit card balances, are...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which supplements the earnings of low-to-moderate income working families, returns over $44 billion each year to these households and their communities and lifts approximately five million people above the poverty line. Unfortunately, paid tax preparers have weakened the economic impact of the EITC by over $600 million a year by offering Refund Anticipation Loans...