Research

Payday loans carry an annual interest rate of 391 percent and are so difficult to pay off that many borrowers end up paying more in interest than they originally borrowed, as documented in our report entitled, Financial Quicksand. Payday lenders renew their loans to the same borrowers many times per year, either by rolling them over for another term, or...

A working paper by a staffer at the Fed Bank of NY is fundamentally flawed, offers no valid information, and is being used to justify policy that keeps low-wealth borrowers trapped in income-draining payday loans. The paper is not a Federal Reserve Bank report as a payday industry press release implies. Our critique exposes the fatal errors in the paper's...

In our December 2006 study, " Losing Ground," CRL predicted that millions of American households would lose their homes to foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market. "Losing Ground" focused on the direct impact of subprime foreclosures, but it did not attempt to quantify how those foreclosures would affect neighboring homes and larger communities. In other words, it did not address...

Recent industry projections are that over eight million families will lose their homes to foreclosure over the next four years. That's one in every six homeowners with a mortgage. If the economy enters a deep recession, the number of homes lost could exceed 10 million. With the housing sector responsible for one in eight U.S. jobs, the flood of new...