Jeff Bezos Quotes

Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.

For too long, Americans have fallen victim to financial abuses at the hands of predatory lenders that operate in the shadows.

Can't make your payments? No problem. The interest charges keep on coming. In fact, banks prefer it that way. More money for them. The government guarantees it.

People get into debt head over heels because banks make it so easy to do so. Then the banks come along and act like these people who can't or won't pay their bills are the dregs of society.

What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don't break the knee caps of those who can't pay back, they still are destroying people's lives.

We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.

It’s going to put people into indentured servitude to the credit card companies.

Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques - from overdraft fees to student loans subsidizing for-profit colleges - specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor. This problem generally goes unrecognized by policy makers.

While payday loans are often the only source of credit for low-income Americans, these lenders are notorious for predatory practices that cause borrowers to fall deeper into debt.

I have seen how payday lenders and check cashing outfits set up in towns around military bases to take advantage of young service members, whose starting salaries are barely over $20,000 per year.

Profiting from student loans is usury, and we just can't continue to allow it.

I was absolutely astonished and could not believe my eyes at the outrageous interest rates that people in need have to pay to get loans.

In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now.

Groups that work in black neighborhoods around the country have contended that much of subprime lending is 'predatory lending.'

Home ownership was the fig leaf for the rise in subprime lending. But that was really about cash-out refinancings, not buying homes.

I'm for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

Community groups contend that door-to-door loan sales are often followed by foreclosures.

The Pentagon got fed up with its recruits getting ripped off by payday lenders and in 2007 got Congress to make it illegal to extend such loans to members of the military. But civilians remain fair game.

For too long, tricks and traps in mortgages, credit cards, and other financial transactions have stripped wealth from working families.

Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to such loans isn't.

The problem is that borrowing money to pay back more borrowed money that will oblige you in the future to borrow even more money doesn't sound kosher. Because it isn't.

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.