Political Quotes

“Mr. President, just weeks after making it harder to stop discrimination in mortgage lending, the Senate is now on the verge of voting to make it harder to stop discrimination in auto lending. About 40 years ago, Congress passed the important civil rights law called the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. That law said companies couldn't discriminate when offering a loan. It was a simple idea: Loan terms should be based on creditworthiness, not on the color of someone's skin. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is one of the Federal agencies responsible for enforcing that 40-year-old law. The CFPB found out that when auto dealers were helping customers get financing for a car loan, minority customers were often given worse loans than their White counterparts. The underlying reason was something called a dealer reserve, where the lenders providing the financing for a car loan gave the dealer discretion to mark up the interest rate on the loan and the dealer could keep some of the additional profit from the markup. The problem was the growing evidence that dealers marked up loans higher for minorities than for Whites with similar credit profiles. In 2013, the CFPB issued guidance to these lenders about how they could make sure they were complying with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.…”