John Layfield Quotes

Unlike public universities and private, not-for-profit colleges, for-profit schools are owned by revenue-seeking businesses often more intent on boosting their bottom line than educating their students. They use hard-sell tactics to recruit prospective students, and veterans have become particular targets.

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

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

It is a certainty that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. We believe it's harming a population of low-income, principally Hispanic people in the U.S. to benefit a handful of super wealthy people at the top of the pyramid.

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.

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.

Every day seems to bring news about another for-profit college scam. Hundreds of thousands of students have been deceived, misled, and harassed into enrolling at these schools where they end up with a mountain of debt and a worthless degree.

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.

The for-profit college industry is clearly the single-heaviest subsidized business in America. More than any defense contractor or any farm operation... So many of them are a horrible waste of students' time and of taxpayer dollars.

I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.

Too often, borrowers who need quick cash end up trapped in loans they can't afford.

By 2006, the subprime industry was running amok, making loans—many of them fraudulent, with hidden fees and abusive terms—to just about anybody with a pulse. Most subprime loans had adjustable interest rates, which started low but then jumped significantly after a few years, making the monthly payments unaffordable for many homeowners. The lenders didn’t care because they sold the loans to Wall Street, which bundled them into mortgage-backed bonds and resold them to investors.

Many view direct-mail fund-raising as a racket for fleecing the old and easily frightened, about as reputable as lottery mailings or time-share sweepstakes. Particularly on the right, there is a whole ecosystem of spurious committees that use candidates’ likenesses to raise funds—money that the candidates never see.

One can be in business and pursue bad profit. That is, by practicing cronyism—rigging the system to undermine competition, innovation and opportunity, making others worse off. Good profit should lead you to improve your ability to help others improve their lives. But that’s not how many businesses act today.

There were absolutely circumstances where Sallie Mae was working hand-in-hand with for-profit schools and other schools in offering and putting students into risky expensive subprime loans.

As I travel across Illinois and talk with people, and as others reach out to my office desperate for help, I am becoming convinced that, despite their rhetoric, many lenders have no interest in actually helping their customers.

Daily fantasy sports is neither victimless nor harmless, and it is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multi-billion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country.

Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.

My investigation found Sallie Mae put student borrowers into expensive subprime loans that it knew were going to fail.

We should make sure that unscrupulous schools do not prey on uninformed students, leaving them with high debt and useless degrees.

You're not allowed to lure people into spending their money or betting their money based on false representations.

We always felt that there was some hanky-panky going on with our money. We were the No. 1 group in the world, but we weren't paid like that.

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.

We pursued many actions against foreclosure rescue scammers who were reaching into the pockets of desperate people in an effort to steal what little remained as they sought to keep their homes.

Legitimate small businesses are put at a huge competitive disadvantage when bad actors lie about their small business status and don't play by the rules.