Press Releases

This week in Sacramento, the banking committees of both houses considered two bills designed to mitigate the effects of California's foreclosure crisis, and both failed in hearing rooms packed with supporters. Both bills, however, will be re-heard next week. Even in light of tremendous involvement from constituents, consumer advocates, labor and grassroots organizations—and on the heels of robo-signing scandals that...

Banks use scare tactics and other misleading practices to persuade consumers to opt into high-cost overdraft programs for debit card purchases, a new CRL survey finds. Even so, the survey finds, most consumers choose not to opt in. The survey results contradict claims that consumers overwhelmingly want to sign up to pay nearly $35 on average each time they overdraw...

Consumers who financed a car through a dealership in 2009 will pay more than $25.8 billion in extra interest over the lives of their loans because of dealer interest rate markups, according to new research by the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). This is an increase of 24 percent from 2007. CRL also found that undisclosed markups increase the odds...

The following statement was issued by the Center for Responsible Lending, the Community Mortgage Banking Project, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors in advance of the April 14 th House Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises hearing on the Qualified Residential Mortgage...

Why: A car is the most common nonfinancial asset Americans own. For most it's a necessity, not a luxury. Too many families suffer at the hands of unscrupulous dealer-financed lending practices: New CRL research shows consumers pay over $20 billion each year in added, nontransparent dealer markups. "Yo-yo" sales and unnecessary service add-ons make car loans needlessly expensive for millions...

National consumer, civil rights, and labor groups ask bank regulators to withdraw the proposed consent orders issued to the nation's mortgage servicers and to work with the state Attorneys General and United States Department of Justice to obtain a joint settlement that addresses illegal servicing practices in a meaningful manner. The draft consent orders that have been released to the...

A positive move by one of the nation's biggest banks this week highlights the extent of overdraft abuse within the financial system and should encourage bank regulators to undertake further reform. In response to consumer feedback, Citibank announced it will begin clearing checks from lowest to highest to minimize overdraft fees. That will be a departure from clearing check transactions...

We renew our call for bank regulators to do their job by protecting consumers from abusive debit card overdraft practices. Bankers' whining about minor reforms should not slow the progress of prudent banking policy. As the subprime mortgage fiasco shows, bad policy allows bad practices that hurt not only borrowers, but investors, taxpayers and the banks themselves. The FDIC has...

Today marks the end of a long and notorious era in lending history, as new Federal Reserve rules take effect to stop mortgage kickbacks. For years, mortgage brokers and loan officers could charge different borrowers different prices for mortgages, even when borrowers had the same qualifications. By steering some customers into unnecessarily riskier and more expensive loans, mortgage brokers often...

Although payday loans are marketed as quick solutions to occasional financial shortfalls, new research from the Center for Responsible Lending shows that these small dollar loans are far from short-term. Payday Loans, Inc., the latest in a series of CRL payday lending research reports, found that payday loan borrowers are indebted for more than half of the year on average...