Brown, Senators Slam Regulators for RentABank Arrangement
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, led a page with five Senators, opposing a proposed guideline because of the workplace regarding the Comptroller for the Currency (OCC) together with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that may eviscerate state laws and regulations that restrict the attention prices on loans and permit unregulated predatory lending across the country.
In a page to OCC Comptroller Joseph Otting and FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams, the Senators pressed straight back from the proposed guidelines, which will gut state regulations by motivating payday as well as other predatory lenders to make use of so-called “rent-a-bank” schemes to evade state laws and regulations capping the attention prices they could charge on loans. The banks nominally fund the loan, but the payday or non-bank lenders do all the work, arranging and collecting payments on the loans, and bearing all or nearly all of the economic risk in rent-a-bank arrangements. The page describes why these rent-a-bank schemes have actually reemerged in the past few years following the OCC and FDIC shut them straight straight down within the 2000s.
“Given the OCC’s and FDIC’s prior efforts to get rid of rent-a-bank plans, it’s distressing to look at agencies now reverse course and propose rules that may earnestly enable these predatory financing schemes,” the Senators composed.