As it turned out, 99 percent of the examples brought to my attention had nothing to do with predatory lending.
One woman from Des Moines, Iowa, was so insistent she had been defrauded in that way that I had to stop her from screaming at me on the phone. But she was unable to define predatory lending for me when I asked her to.
It seems she's not the only one who can't. I recently came across an academic paper prepared under the auspices of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University that noted that "various parties have used the term predatory lending to describe a wide range of abuses."
"Regulators, industry, and advocates have not agreed to a single definition, but have used the term individually to refer to different practices and loan terms," the paper, by Deborah Goldstein, stated.
For your reference, these are key considerations in determining whether a loan is predatory, Goldstein said:
The form and context in which the lender provided or withheld information from prospective borrowers.
The borrower's ability to freely choose not to take the loan or to choose from competing products.
Whether the lender targeted a vulnerable population or protected class.
Intentional or systematic patterns of selling overpriced loans to populations whose mental, physical, or intellectual status makes them vulnerable to the lenders' sales tactics.
The Human Relations Commission accused Wells Fargo of "reverse redlining," meaning that instead of avoiding an area because of a high risk of default, a line was drawn around the same area determining "that anyone within that area could be sold what could charitably be described as an 'unconventional' loan."
That definition of reverse redlining was offered by Eric C. Garrabrant, a lawyer with Flaster/Greenberg P.C., of Linwood, N.J.
