Research

Provision Senate Bureau of Consumer Protection House Consumer Financial Protection Agency Administration Consumer Financial Protection Agency Presidentially Appointed Director Yes, confirmed by the Senate. Yes, confirmed by the Senate. Yes, confirmed by the Senate. Independent source of funding Yes, from the Federal Reserve Board budget. Yes, from the Federal Reserve Board budget. Yes, with fees on "entities and transactions" within the financial system. Rule-making Authority Writes rules, but rules can be vetoed by a two-thirds vote of a newly created council of bank regulators. Full rule...

Read our report (PDF) >> Our nation's largest banks extract billions of dollars in fees from their customers each year through abusive overdraft loan programs. Over the last ten years, these programs developed and proliferated under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the national banks' primary regulator. The OCC recognized problems with the systems early on but has taken no meaningful action to address them. Today, financial institutions routinely approve even the smallest debit card transaction that results in an overdraft. The overdraft programs at the OCC's banks are...

Download our report "Mainstream Banks Making Payday Loans" (PDF) UPDATE April 2010. A spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency told a reporter that the loans described in this report are not payday loans -- that the OCC has no problem with banks making them. "It's not a payday loan. It's available through banks and bank branches. It's something you don't get at a storefront." These are high-interest loans due on payday, virtually indistinguishable from storefront payday loans that have been banned in many states and by Congress to protect military personnel. Another example...

A few provisions of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act that President Obama signed into law May 2009 took effect immediately, and a few didn't take effect until August of that year. But most of the provisions took effect February 22, 2010. While these new rules are a significant improvement from the status quo that pervaded credit card policies for years, they are not enough. In the months leading up to the changes that took effect February 22, 2010, credit card issuers adopted tricks and traps intended to evade the law. The Federal Reserve Board, which wrote...

When homeowners are at risk of losing their home to foreclosure, the last thing they need is an extra tax bill. Congress passed the 2007 Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act ("the 2007 Act") specifically to avoid imposing extra taxes on distressed families, but as currently written, the law doesn't work. In passing the 2007 Act, Congress recognized that taxing this debt relief would directly undermine the fundamental intent of mortgage write-downs, and the legislation exempts some debt relief from taxes. But there are two problems: The 2007 Act effectively denies this exemption to a large...

Presented by Kathleen Keest, Senior Policy Counsel-Center for Responsible Lending at the symposium "The Subprime Housing Crisis: Interdisciplinary Policy Perspectives" October 10-11, 2008 at The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA In many respects, events have overtaken this conference. In 2006, CRL released a study that projected 2.2 million foreclosures of subprime mortgages. [1] But by this spring, Credit Suisse projected 6.5 million foreclosures over the next five years, as the housing crisis spread beyond the subprime sector into the larger mortgage market. [2] There is a downward spiral of...

Report Author: Josh Frank As of Jan 12, 2010, the Federal Reserve has effectively ended the "pick-a-rate" practice and the use of variable rate floors. These two abuses are featured in the 12/10/09 Dodging Reform report. Download the full report >> Download the executive summary >> Download table of abusive practices >> CRL's new report, Dodging Reform, finds: Issuers have adopted schemes to game interest rates, with the little known "pick-a-rate" practice gaining increasing momentum. Pick-a-rate costs American consumers $720 million per year and it may reach up to $2.5 billion annually as the...

Did you know that 6 out of 10 people who received subprime loans during the height of the lending boom could have qualified for a lower-cost mortgage--and it was completely legal? The vast majority of subprime loans made by mortgage brokers or loan officers came with a "yield-spread premium" – a kickback that brokers received from lenders in exchange for hiking the interest rates on loans or steering borrowers into more expensive, riskier loan products. The Federal Reserve Board is now deciding whether to fix the problem of price gouging on mortgages. They have heard from many mortgage brokers...

Did you know that 6 out of 10 people who received subprime loans in 2006 could have qualified for a lower-cost mortgage, but didn't get the better deal because their mortgage broker earned a "kickback" for steering them to the higher-cost loan. And all this was completely legal. The Federal Reserve Board is now deciding whether to fix this by preventing lenders from paying loan officers and brokers higher compensation for putting borrowers in loans with higher interest rates or into riskier loan products. The Fed's final decision will have enormous implications for all home buyers--but...