“Here we go again. The Center for Responsible Lending uses scary voodoo numbers like 400% interest that have no basis in reality to try and score a cheap political point,” said Tim Miller, communications director at the Center for Consumer Freedom. “It is intellectually dishonest to call a $15 fee on a $100 loan 400% interest. It is even more brazen to make that claim when the legislation CRL references would make it illegal for borrowers to roll loans over enough times to even approach that percentage. What CRL doesn’t tell you is that their own 2007 study shows that short-term payday lenders received 16.4% interest on their loans.”

“This shouldn’t be surprising from an organization that was founded by subprime lending billionaires who invented so-called “Pick-a-Payment” adjustable rate mortgages. CRL is currently the advocacy arm of a billion-dollar financial network that is a direct competitor of the short-term loan industry, and which charges its customers fees for services that cost more than short-term payday loans.”

But, unfortunately for consumers, CRL doesn’t want consumer protections.  They just want to ban payday lending.  As they’ve admitted, “driving the practice of payday lending out of the state—not simply reining in interest rates” is CRL’s goal.

“We are concerned that states considering regulation and enforcement of consumer protections may be swayed by misinformation from CRL. Veritec supports effective regulation of short-term lending that provides borrower access to short-term credit products with enforcement of consumer protections. State bans on short-term credit products often have an unintentional consequence of helping unregulated lenders, such as off-shore Internet lenders, by eliminating a consumer’s option to choose a regulated product,” said Mr. Reinheimer. “To better illustrate this, all anyone has to do is to search the Internet for loans available in rate cap states and see that unregulated, unlicensed activity is alive and well.”

Self-Helping “Center for Responsible Lending” Cynically Cherrypicks Data to Play “Race Card” in Effort to Push Bogus Consumer Regulations

On March 26, 2009 the Center for Responsible Lending issued a troubling report titled “Predatory Profiling: The Role of Race and Ethnicity in the Location of Payday Lenders in California.” The group is right to seek “efforts to help low- and moderate-income families build emergency savings…” However, a careful analysis of the “study” reveals that there are grave problems with the group’s methodology, assumptions, and motivations.

Just who is the man Herb Sandler? First he’s embroiled in scandal and second he’s a liberal financier of left-wing causes. I posted back on Feb. 16th the story from 60 Minutes that him and his wife bilked people into engaging in loans where their payments didn’t even cover the interest on the loan — so these poor people got poorer and poorer every time they made a house payment.

And why did he found Center for Responsible Lending?

http://irresponsiblelending.org

Both the transcript and full video segment are available online.

An excerpt:

In fact, Herb and Marion Sandler were legendary. In 1963, they started Golden West Financial and grew to 285 branches under the name World Savings. The Sandlers’ were known for careful, conservative lending. They’ve given away millions of dollars to charity and started an advocacy group for low income borrowers called the Center for Responsible Lending.

In 2006, just before the housing crash, the Sandlers sold their bank to Wachovia and pocketed $2.3 billion.

Trouble is, some of their money came from people like Betty Townes, who is financially ruined after being sold a series of World Savings mortgages she couldn’t afford.

Reminds me of an old Alanis Morissette song.

There’s a new school of anti-consumer-choice advocacy, and it’s taken the model of professional busybodyism beyond our menus and into our wallets. Leading the charge is a group that may be as deceptive, meddling, and filthy rich as any other group you’ve seen here: the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).