Research

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 by aggressively marketed, tricky financial products carrying hidden costs and fees. Dangerous products, whose most "innovative" feature was their ability to obscure their true costs and risks, led a race to...

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 the amount of time the borrower has to repay the loan, and factors in the reduction in principal as payments are made over time. For centuries, the standard has been to compare interest rates on an annual basis, whether the loan is...

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 tough time between paychecks, and the industry claims that they are not for repeated use. Yet, women living paycheck to paycheck can't afford to pay back the full amount of their payday loans and cover other...

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 377, authored by Asm. Tony Mendoza (D-Los Angeles), would raise the payday loan limit from $300 to $500 on the industry's assertion that $300 is insufficient due to California's high cost of living. Not only is more debt rarely...

"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 in the most arbitration cases--and therefore in creating the most business for arbitrators--consistently receive more favorable rulings than firms involved in fewer cases. Almost all...

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 in increasingly risky lending practices that harmed borrowers, undermined the institutions' own financial health, and ran up enormous costs that have landed in the taxpayer's lap. OTS was slow to act as the financial...

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 raising interest rates on a larger portion of customers than usual and increasing the number of fees they impose. The new Fed rule will ban some but not all of these activities. [i] Perhaps most notable is what these issuers? Citigroup, Bank of...

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 (RALs) that give EITC recipients quicker access to their refunds in return for high fees of 50-500 percent APR. Households in communities of color are disproportionately impacted by high-cost RAL...

The California Office of the Center for Responsible Lending prepared the following documents to help California's newest legislators navigate the predatory payday lending arena. SNAPSHOT: Payday Lending in California Predatory Profiling: The Role of Race and Ethnicity in the Location of Payday Lenders in California About Us CRL's California Office Visit the Self-Help Web site to learn about Self-Help's Impact on communities and individuals.