Professor Baher Azmy and Professor David Reiss document how predatory home lending practices have become rampant throughout the country and, notably, among low- and moderate-income and African American communities in New Jersey. Their article analyzes this emerging problem as a sometimes devastating side effect of the rapid increase in American home ownership, an otherwise almost completely desirable phenomenon. Because predatory lending has been so difficult to define, states have struggled to regulate it. New Jersey, building on the work of a few other leading states, has drafted what many consider to be the new standard for predatory lending legislation, the Home Ownership Security Act. The article places the Act in the context of governing
On Friday, 09/23/2016, at approximately 0830 hours, I, Deputy Stacy Stark #1815 met with the reporting party, James R. Boucher (M/W, DOB: 07/25/1959) at the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office. I requested James R. Boucher to come to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office to review the Wal-Mart video footage I collected and identify the suspect, James Roy Boucher (M/W, DOB: 03/16/1978) on the video footage.
Predatory lending usually occurs when financial institutions take unfair advantage of consumer’s financial needs by extending credit with terms that compensate them over and beyond the credit risk. Predatory lending comes in different forms, but always involve the consumer paying high interest rates and exorbitant fees. Some predatory lending practices include:
The United States Attorney’s Office Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Predatory Lending. Retrieved October 31, 2011. http://www.justice.gov/usao/pae/Documents/predatorylending.htm
Robber Barons in America What is a robber baron? Webster’s New Dictionary defines him as an American capitalist of the late 19th century who became wealthy through exploitation (as of natural resources, governmental influence, or low wage scales) or a person who satisfies himself by depriving another. In America, we have a lot of these kinds of people. For this report, I am going to tell you about the ones that I found most interesting to me.
The United States’ government has always had a hand on our country’s housing market. From requiring land ownership to vote, to providing public housing to impoverished families, our government has become an irremovable part of the housing market. The effects of these housing policies can affect American residents in ways they might not even recognize. As several historians have concluded, many housing policies, especially those on public housing, either resulted in or reinforced the racial segregation of neighborhoods.
Two individual employees wanted to complete their assignment for their company. But, did their strategy go about accuracy? Karel Svoboda works for Rogue Bank. Svoboda is a credit officer who needed Alena Robles, independent accountant, assists to evaluate and approved his employer’s extensions of credit to clients. In order to complete the task, Svoboda needed to access the nonpublic information about the clients’ personal information related to the company such as their profits and performances. Instead of appropriately following the company policy, Svoboda and Robles created a plan to utilize this data to exchange securities. According to their plan, Robles exchanged the securities of more than twenty unique organizations and benefitted by
Not all heroes wear capes. The industrial revolution, during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, gave birth to numerous factories throughout the United States. With the technological innovations of efficient tools, heavy machinery, and other devices used to mass produce, this period in time required less human and animal power to complete troublesome tasks. Incidentally, the government did not lead this great time in history, the Laissez Policy did not allow them to. The leaders of this industrial revolution were people such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Philip Armour, Leland Stanford, and a few more. Due to some of these leaders, people coined the term “Robber Barons,” because they were able to create unfair competition and economically manipulate the price of their product when they formed trusts or monopolies. However,
Countrywide’s ambition to help more Americans take part in the “American dream” of homeownership was a noble gesture. However, as noble as the goal was Countrywide failed to protect themselves and the same people they desired to help. The demographic of borrowers Countrywide marketed to were specific: low-income and minorities. Countrywide saw a need and a wide open opportunity to make money, however, they also took a large risk with offering loans to borrowers that would not have met the standards for a “traditional” loan. At first the borrowers were able to keep up with their loan payments (the economy was stable and the job market was solid).
According to the Institute on Race and Poverty (IRP) in 2000 a white individual making the same income annually as any other race has a 78-percent chance of owning a home, and only a 22-percent chance of having their credit denied on a loan, however, minorities like Blacks and Hispanics have a significantly lower chance of both. (Lawrence, and Keleher 3). In fact, Blacks with those same specifications only have a 48-percent chance to own a home, and an astounding 45-percent chance to have their credit denied on a loan. Meanwhile, Hispanics have a 46-percent chance to own a home, and a 31-percent chance of having their credit denied. While this may seem overtly discriminatory with just a glance, one must first delve into what those numbers actually mean, and the details went into creating those numbers, as well as take a peek into the institution that created those numbers before jumping to the conclusion that it is empirically racist. Recently, racism has exploded into the spotlight worldwide, and especially in the United States of America with stories of racially motivated police brutality and a supposed “race war” taking center stage. All this coming 47 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought to end racial tension and racist government policies with the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, only to be gunned down in 1968 by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee (Martin Luther King Jr. 2015). With all these facts in mind, the United States is still and will always be plagued by both structural and institutional racism.
This blog post describes research on the effect of limits on payday lending. It notes that a study by Harold Cuffe and Christopher Gibbs has found that such restrictions not only restrict the number of payday loans being made, they also significantly reduce sales at liquor stores, particularly for those within 33 feet of a payday lender.
Title 42 U.S. Code § 12703 - Purposes of Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act, states, “to retain wherever feasible as housing affordable to low-income families those dwelling units produced for such purpose with Federal assistance” (US Constitution). Meaning, low-income houses should be valued as such only under reasonable circumstances. Affordable housing protection laws and policies like perpetuity clauses are resulting in unintended consequences. The intricacy of Law of the United States deploys a sense of justification, deposition, and perpetuation of structural violence via housing laws. How are selling and refinancing restrictions set forth by permanent perpetuity clauses on low income homes affecting the homeowners, their
Do you have bad credit? You are exactly the kind of person that payday loan companies are happy to lend. Most of the time, they do not check their creditworthiness because they know you're desperate and sign their forms without reading them all. It speeds up the process of withdrawing money in hand, but it locks you on their terms. Please read their form carefully before signing and if you do not understand anything ask for explanations, this is your right as a buyer, so if they try to push you - go away. Get trained and get help from someone you trust who has experience reading legal documents.
Mortgage loans are a substantial form of revenue for the financial industry. Mortgage loans generate billions of dollars in the financial industry. It is no secret that companies have the ability to make a lot of money by offering a variety of mortgage loan products. The problem was not mortgage loans but that mortgage companies were using unethical behavior to get consumer mortgage loans approved. Unfortunately, the Countrywide Financial case was not an isolated case. Many top name mortgage companies have been guilty of unethical behavior. Just as the American housing market was starting to recover from its worst battering since the Great Depression, a new scandal, an epidemic of flawed or fraudulent mortgage documents, threatens to send not just the housing market but the entire economy back into a tailspin (Nation, 2010).
Before deciding which type of loan is better, one must take into account the situation. Both payday and installment loans for poor credit can be beneficial in different ways, despite recent criticism from advocates for consumers. There are those that are beneficial and legit, and others that have the effect of dragging consumers into a cycling of owed debt. Payday loans as well as installment loans are often referred to as small-dollar and high-cost loans.
This module described various predatory practices by businesses. Using scholarly resources, describe some specific examples of predatory practices. Should the debtor or borrower bear some responsibility, at least in some instances? Explain why or why not?