CRL in the News

“Cancelling $50,000 in student loan debt is the minimum needed to begin addressing the racial wealth gap,” said Jaylon Herbin, policy and outreach manager and student loan lead at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). “Student debt most negatively impacts those historically marginalized through systemic inequalities that have only continued to grow. President Biden can and should use the authority of executive action to uphold the administration’s commitment to helping communities of color and women, who deserve the ability to build their American dream.”

Worker earnings, whether from low wages or limited hours, are the very reason EWA apps can endanger their finances, says Yasmin Farahi, senior policy council for the Center for Responsible Lending. "On those margins," she said, "even what looks like a low fee can be problematic."

"We applaud President Biden and Vice President Harris for this move," Whitney Barkley, the Center for Responsible Lending's senior policy counsel, said. "Tens of thousands of former Corinthian students who had been defrauded by their school, and left wondering for years how they’d recover the money they lost, are now at ease. The administration now needs to immediately cancel $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower and abandon its piecemeal approach to cancellation. "While historic, the relief provided to Corinthian students represents only a tiny fraction of students who need cancellation,"

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 than they used to be,” said Eric Stein, senior vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending.

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 would have allowed lenders to charge.

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 the Center for Responsible Lending. “And they also surprisingly are more expensive.”

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 consumers,” says Peter Smith, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending. “These are highly capitalized entities that are seeking to make money in a way that sometimes is fairly shrouded from the consumer.”

“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 bank account reported overdrafting in December, according to a survey from Morning Consult.

“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.”